$Microsoft(MSFT.US)Microsoft's recent stock price plunge (market cap once evaporated over $350 billion) was not due to "poor" company performance, but because its "input-output ratio" and "growth certainty" failed to meet the market's extremely high expectations.

1. Core contradiction: Burning cash vs. growth falling short 📉

Wall Street's core logic is "high valuation requires high growth to support." Microsoft currently faces an awkward situation: spending more money than expected, but the results aren't showing.

* Capital expenditure (CapEx) out of control: Microsoft's CapEx this quarter soared to $37.5 billion, up 66% YoY, far exceeding market expectations. This huge sum was mainly used to purchase GPUs and build AI data centers.

* Growth hits the brakes: The market originally expected such massive investment to immediately translate into explosive growth in cloud business. However, the core Azure cloud service revenue growth was only 39%, slightly below Wall Street's expectation of 39.4%. For a giant of this size, even a 0.4% gap is seen as a "serious accident," directly triggering market panic over "whether AI investment is effective."

2. Key mistake: The "cart before the horse" strategy in computing power allocation 🤖

Wall Street analysts found that behind Microsoft's underperformance lies a strategic choice issue, not a capability problem.

* Internal consumption vs. external monetization: Microsoft CFO Amy Hood admitted that if the company allocated more newly launched GPU computing power to Azure cloud customers (directly generating revenue) instead of prioritizing internal AI needs (like Copilot and OpenAI model training), cloud business growth could have easily exceeded 40%.

* Analysts' concerns: Institutions like UBS questioned Microsoft's prioritization of scarce resources (GPUs) for internal AI products that haven't yet scaled monetization, sacrificing short-term profitability in cloud business growth. This is seen as "short-sighted" and "inefficient" by Wall Street.

3. Hidden risk: Over-reliance on OpenAI 🎲

Wall Street hates "single-point risks." Analysts spotted alarming data in the earnings report:

* Backlog risk: Of Microsoft's $62.5 billion remaining performance obligations, about 45% is tied to OpenAI.

* Fragile supply chain: This means nearly half of Microsoft's future revenue depends on a startup's (OpenAI) payment ability and partnership stability. Given OpenAI's recent moves to collaborate with other cloud providers, this "all eggs in one basket" strategy makes investors uneasy.

4. Financial "window dressing" and fundamental concerns 📉

Beyond growth issues, Wall Street also 敏锐地 detected "water" in the financial statements and declining profit margins.

* One-time gains interference: Microsoft's net profit this quarter looked impressive but included a $7.6 billion one-time gain from OpenAI restructuring. Excluding this, actual net profit growth wasn't as rosy.

* Margin erosion: Due to GPU depreciation and surging hardware costs, the Intelligent Cloud segment's gross margin dropped from 70% to 66%, a three-year low. This shows AI's capital-intensive nature is eroding Microsoft's high-margin moat as a "light-asset" software company.