Microsoft (MSFT) news that moved the stock

What happened

Microsoft has terminated its agreement to anchor Nscale's planned £2 billion data center in Loughton, Essex, after UK grid officials told Nscale the site would not receive sufficient power until the 2030s. The Telegraph first reported the termination on Sunday, October 18; Microsoft and Nscale confirmed it on Monday, October 19. Both companies stressed the decision relates to a single site, that their broader relationship remains strong and long-term, and that it has no impact on other contracts. Nscale said it remains committed to the Loughton project and is exploring alternative power sources.

What happened

Bloomberg reported on Oct 9 that OpenAI has told prospective investors it expects annualized revenue to reach or exceed $70 billion by the end of 2026, driven largely by growth in its enterprise business. The ChatGPT-maker's annualized revenue was roughly $50 billion at the end of September, the report said — but the company shared the $70B year-end figure with investors as part of discussions for its latest fundraising round, in which it is in talks to raise $30B or more at a $1.4 trillion pre-money valuation. The report directly countered Thursday's Financial Times account that had triggered a broad AI-stock sell-off (Nasdaq 100 -1.4%), and software stocks rebounded sharply on Friday: Zscaler +7.8%, Snowflake +7.4%, Datadog +7.1%, Palantir +5.2% to a new all-time high, Microsoft +2.4%.

What happened

RBC reiterated its Outperform rating on Intuit (INTU) with a $385 price target, according to Ground News reporting surfaced October 9. The affirmation comes with Intuit trading near $304 — roughly 27% below RBC's target — after shares rallied 2.71% Thursday to $303.88, their fourth consecutive daily gain. The target sits below the 31-firm consensus of $431.55 but well above current levels, and it marks the most bullish fresh analyst signal on INTU since the September guidance fallout.

What happened

On Thursday, Oct 8, Vice President JD Vance and Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling announced the indefinite suspension of Microsoft, Adobe, Cognizant, Infosys, Tata, Wipro, HCL Technologies, and Capgemini from the Department of Labor's PERM permanent-labor-certification program, accusing them of fraud and abuse. The government will accept no new PERM applications and will not process pending ones involving these companies — cutting off a key employer-sponsored route to green cards for skilled foreign workers. Vance singled out Microsoft, saying 'no company in the United States... has abused this system more than Microsoft,' and cited Microsoft laying off 6,000 U.S. workers while using 6,300 H-1B visas and nearly 3,000 green cards. Microsoft defended its visa use and said it looks forward to sharing more information with the administration. Separately, officials announced J-1 visa-program abuse probes into nine universities including Harvard, Yale, and Stanford. MSFT shares fell more than 1.3% Thursday.

What happened

The Financial Times reported Thursday that OpenAI's annualized revenue is on track to reach $50 billion, roughly $20 billion below earlier reported figures, based on financial documents shared with investors. The lower run-rate suggested the pace of growth for AI leaders is moderating rather than accelerating. Tech stocks fell in afternoon trading: the Nasdaq composite dropped 1.3%, the S&P 500 fell 0.6%, and AI-exposed names sold off hard - CoreWeave and Constellation Energy each fell about 6%, while Astera Labs and Arm Holdings each plunged roughly 8%. Futurum strategist Shay Boloor noted the $20B gap between OpenAI's real run-rate and reported number reflects sales flowing through AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure rather than disappearing revenue.

What happened

Dell expanded its Windows computing portfolio with new NVIDIA-powered systems developed with NVIDIA and Microsoft. The XPS 16 Creator Edition is Dell's first XPS laptop built around NVIDIA RTX Spark hardware, pairing a Blackwell GPU with a Grace CPU and up to 128GB of unified memory, with a 3.2K tandem OLED display; U.S. Best Buy pre-orders opened October 7. Dell also introduced the Creator Edition Desktop (up to one petaflop of FP4 compute, able to run up to 200-billion-parameter models, availability to follow soon) and renamed its Dell Pro Max workstation range to Dell Pro Precision, including GB300-based systems for Windows delivering up to 20 petaflops of FP4 and 748GB of coherent memory, capable of running up-to-1-trillion-parameter models locally. Shares rose 1.3% to $581.47 on the announcement.

What happened

Wedbush tech analyst Dan Ives, the longtime prominent tech bull, initiated coverage on 49 names across the tech landscape on Wednesday with Outperform ratings across the board, including: Apple (AAPL) $400 and Alphabet (GOOGL) $400 price targets, Amazon (AMZN) $300, Meta (META) $900, Microsoft (MSFT) $615, Nvidia (NVDA) $300, Tesla (TSLA) $500, plus SpaceX at $225. SoftBank was initiated at Outperform with a $290 target and CrowdStrike (CRWD) at Outperform with a $335 target. Ives' thesis centers on the infrastructure layer staying supply-constrained 'through at least 2027,' with companies owning scarce compute, memory, and power capturing growth; enterprise software has recovered, cybersecurity takes a growing share of IT budgets, and 'physical AI' is the newest front. The initiation comes a month after Ives launched the Ives Ultra AI Opportunities closed-end fund (IVAI) targeting late-stage private AI companies.

What happened

The Financial Times reported on Wednesday, October 7, 2026 that the European Commission is working on ways to capture more revenue from large U.S. tech groups — including Apple (AAPL), Meta (META) and Google (GOOGL) — through a broad levy on large corporations, in a bid to raise EU revenue while avoiding backlash from the Trump administration. Brussels is considering changes to its 'Corporate Resource for Europe' (CORE) proposal that would require all companies operating in the EU with revenue of more than €100 million ($112 million) a year to pay an annual lump-sum tax contribution, currently set at between €100,000 and €750,000 per company. The reporting cites six EU officials with knowledge of the discussions. Reuters could not immediately verify the report, and the Commission, CCIA, Apple, Google and Meta did not immediately respond to requests for comment outside regular business hours.

What happened

Pedram Rezaei, a nearly 20-year Microsoft veteran who was most recently a corporate vice president on Microsoft's Superintelligence team and previously served as Copilot chief technology officer, started Monday (Oct 5) as a distinguished engineer at Amazon Web Services, per an internal AWS memo from Swami Sivasubramanian reported Monday. Rezaei joins the AWS Agentic AI and Emerging Technologies organization and will work initially on Kiro, AWS's AI coding tool, and Quick, Amazon's AI workplace assistant. Sivasubramanian described him as 'a hands-on engineer who is still in the code every day,' and Rezaei's first plan is to 'meet people, learn how things work here, and ship something real.' The hire comes as Amazon and Microsoft compete directly in AI developer and productivity tools, and Rezaei is the latest Microsoft executive to move to AWS this year.

What happened

The seven mega-cap companies — Nvidia, Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta and Tesla — ended Monday's trading with a combined market capitalization of $24.836 trillion, a new record, according to Dow Jones Market Data. Nvidia, the largest company by market cap, finished the day with a record-high stock price, closing at $237.58 (+2.1%) for a market capitalization of roughly $5.76 trillion. Microsoft rose 1.5%, ending at its highest level since last October and moving back toward a $4 trillion market cap. The record aggregate is larger than the nominal GDP of every country in the world except the United States.