Microsoft (MSFT) News

Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson speaks at a podium bearing the state seal in front of a columned building in Olympia.

Oct 30, 2026, 5:21 PM

Washington governor rips Microsoft over TV ad in leaked audio

Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson criticized Microsoft for funding a PAC whose TV ad, aired during Seahawks games, says “Olympia is broken.” Microsoft has given the group, Washington Needs to Compete, more than $5 million of the $13.8 million it has raised. Read More

Oct 28, 2026, 4:28 PM

Bigger than Bing or Xbox: Microsoft’s OpenAI haul reaches $10B in quarterly revenue

OpenAI generated $10 billion in revenue for Microsoft in the quarter ended Sept. 30, about 11% of Microsoft’s total, according to the company’s quarterly filing. That’s more than Microsoft made in the quarter from Xbox, search and advertising, or Windows PC licensing and Surface devices. Read More

Oct 28, 2026, 1:47 PM

Microsoft Azure revenue surges 48% to $33.2B, beating expectations as cloud and AI demand grows

Microsoft’s Azure cloud business brought in $33.2 billion in the September quarter, up 48%, the first time the company has reported Azure’s quarterly revenue. Total revenue rose 19% to $92.3 billion, while capital spending of $45.2 billion came in below Microsoft’s forecast of more than $50 billion. Read More

Oct 27, 2026, 10:50 AM

Microsoft earnings preview: Employee buyouts, AI spending and a new financial scorecard

Microsoft reports fiscal first-quarter results Wednesday, its first under a new structure that splits the company into two segments, two days after offering buyouts to about 60,000 employees. Analysts expect revenue of $90.75 billion, and Microsoft will start disclosing Azure revenue every quarter. Read More

Two men stand on a stage in front of large screens showing the Amazon and Anthropic logos, with an audience in the foreground.

Oct 27, 2026, 6:53 AM

Who’s getting Anthropic’s compute spending? IPO filing shows where the tech giants really stand

Anthropic’s IPO filing details more than $750 billion in computing deals, with more going to Google’s chips and Elon Musk’s SpaceX than to Amazon or Microsoft. Amazon’s biggest payoff is its stake, which it valued at $190.4 billion in June. Read More

Thomas Dohmke, wearing glasses and a blue shirt, smiles while seated in an armchair on stage during a panel discussion.

Oct 26, 2026, 10:37 AM

Former GitHub CEO launches rival platform built for AI coding agents

Entire, the startup led by former GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke, launched a platform for hosting and reviewing code that it’s pitching as an alternative to GitHub. The company says its Trails feature, which replaces the pull request, uses AI agents to score each code change so developers can merge without reading every line. Read More

Oct 26, 2026, 8:57 AM

Microsoft makes new ‘voluntary exit’ offer to about a quarter of its workforce, including some execs

Microsoft is offering buyouts to about 60,000 employees in the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and India, with no age or tenure requirement. The package is equivalent to the company’s standard severance, and Microsoft expects a much smaller share of employees to accept than took its spring retirement program. Read More

Ten framed posters for Microsoft Garage science fairs and hack days hanging in two rows on a white wall.

Oct 23, 2026, 11:53 AM

The Garage never should have existed: Why Microsoft’s grassroots innovation lab worked for so long

Microsoft Garage co-founder Quinn Hawkins explains how the employee innovation program outlasted bigger, better-funded efforts inside Microsoft for 17 years, as the company winds it down. He credits four choices, including backing people who built projects rather than voting on ideas, and getting business groups to pay for their own events. Read More

Oct 21, 2026, 2:55 PM

Microsoft taps Stripe co-founder John Collison for its board as two longtime directors depart

Microsoft has nominated Stripe co-founder and President John Collison to its board, according to the company’s annual proxy statement, filed Wednesday. The proxy also shows that Disney CFO Hugh Johnston, chair of the board’s audit committee, won’t seek re-election, joining LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman in leaving the board in December. Read More

Oct 20, 2026, 10:53 AM

Microsoft shuts the door on The Garage, the central program behind its hackathon and maker spaces

Microsoft is winding down The Garage, the 17-year-old program behind its Global Hackathon and employee maker spaces, according to an internal FAQ. Some Garage spaces could be restricted to employees as early as Friday, and Microsoft says the hackathon team is reimagining the event. Read More

Oct 19, 2026, 6:05 AM

Microsoft unveils tools to monitor and corral rogue AI agents

New features in Microsoft 365 E7 and Project Perception will assess each agent’s risk, with the ability to block it from making changes, require human intervention or shut it down. Read More

Oct 15, 2026, 2:19 PM

Leaked list shows what Microsoft, Amazon and other tech giants are giving for the White House ballroom

Microsoft committed $10 million to President Trump’s White House ballroom project, and Amazon and T-Mobile each committed $5 million, according to a donor list obtained by the Washington Post. The donations aren’t subject to campaign finance limits or disclosure requirements, raising concerns that companies could be buying influence or feeling pressured to give. Read More

Oct 15, 2026, 10:36 AM

Microsoft’s Brad Smith pushes back on Vice President JD Vance’s visa fraud accusations

Someone “failed to inform the vice president accurately about our numbers” before blocking Microsoft from sponsoring foreign workers for permanent residency, asserts Brad Smith, the company’s president and vice chair, in an interview with Politico. Read More

Oct 14, 2026, 6:27 AM

Microsoft’s wild ride: Stock hits new record after a year of ups and downs

Microsoft’s stock has gained about $1.4 trillion in value since late June, lifting the company’s market value just above $4 trillion. The rebound accelerated after Microsoft reported 43% growth in Azure, its cloud platform. Read More

Oct 13, 2026, 10:27 AM

Microsoft’s top science exec is leaving to fulfill a childhood dream: Joining a Formula 1 team

Peter Lee, the longtime Microsoft Research leader, plans to join the Mercedes Formula 1 team in a newly created AI advisor role. He’ll work on physics problems for the team’s car, predictive models and how F1’s regulators might govern AI. Read More

Oct 12, 2026, 6:22 AM

Microsoft makes ‘biggest bet yet’ on its own silicon, unveils new AI chip to reduce reliance on Nvidia

Microsoft says its homegrown Maia chips will handle most of the AI work behind Copilot and its other products, with the new Maia 300 rolling out in 2027. The company says the new chip does more AI work with the same amount of electricity than the GPU-based systems that power most AI today. Read More

Oct 9, 2026, 10:48 AM

From H-1B to CEO: How Satya Nadella traveled the path the U.S. just cut off for Microsoft workers

Microsoft’s Satya Nadella followed the path from a temporary work visa to permanent residency to U.S. citizenship. On Thursday, President Trump honored him with a national medal, hours after the administration blocked Microsoft from sponsoring its foreign workers for permanent residency. Here’s how the programs work, and what the numbers show about Microsoft’s practices. Read More

Oct 9, 2026, 6:55 AM

Microsoft 2.5: GitHub COO Kyle Daigle on stitching the developer universe together

Kyle Daigle, who now also leads developer marketing across Microsoft, says GitHub is roughly 60% through its migration to Azure as it works through capacity problems and outages. He also talks about GitHub’s place in Microsoft’s AI agent strategy. Read More

Oct 8, 2026, 10:48 AM

Microsoft responds to White House immigration crackdown as Trump honors Nadella

The Labor Department suspended Microsoft from the federal program it uses to help foreign workers stay in the U.S. permanently, and won’t process the company’s pending applications. The announcement came hours before President Trump was scheduled to give Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. Read More

Oct 7, 2026, 12:52 PM

Microsoft plays the Windows card in the AI game, with help from Nvidia

At an event in San Francisco, Microsoft announced features that will let Copilot read the files on a PC, take actions on the machine and run AI models locally instead of in the cloud. New PCs built around an Nvidia chip, including a $2,599 Surface laptop, start shipping Oct. 16. Read More

Sep 30, 2026, 10:48 AM

‘Agents are very harsh customers’: Microsoft exec warns many apps will lose pricing leverage

Microsoft’s Charles Lamanna says most business software will end up running behind AI agents rather than in front of users, leaving apps with less pricing power and customer loyalty. His comments come as Amazon blocks Meta’s Muse agent from shopping on its site. Read More

Sep 25, 2026, 5:00 AM

Microsoft unveils all-in-one Copilot app, taking on Anthropic and OpenAI in new push to boost adoption

Microsoft’s revamped Copilot app adds AI coding, always-on agents and full versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint as the company competes with OpenAI and Anthropic and shifts more of its AI pricing to usage-based billing. Read More

Sep 24, 2026, 8:05 PM

Artists, game designers and producers hit hard as Microsoft cuts 277 jobs in Washington state

A new state filing lists all 277 positions Microsoft eliminated in the Seattle region, one job title at a time. Art, game production, game design, technical art and audio design account for 77 of them, with software engineering the largest single category at 60. Read More

Sep 24, 2026, 1:08 PM

Internal memos: Microsoft shakes up communications as Nadella makes a push to build in public

Microsoft is moving communications out of its marketing group and under Vice Chair and President Brad Smith, as CEO Satya Nadella calls for a fundamentally new approach that makes employees a bigger part of how the company tells its story. Read More

Sep 14, 2026, 4:34 PM

‘The warning signs are flashing’: New regional partnership calls for cohesive Seattle-area tech strategy

Regional leaders from four counties launched the Partnership for a Competitive Puget Sound, a 20-point plan responding to the loss of nearly 7,000 jobs last year. The group’s report says the Seattle area’s technology industry has no coordinated strategy of its own. Read More

Sep 14, 2026, 7:31 AM

Microsoft floats rules for AI models as industry weighs slowdown

Microsoft published a draft code of conduct for its in-house AI models, barring them from resisting shutdown or hiding their reasoning — as Anthropic, OpenAI and Elon Musk call for slowing AI development. Read More

Sep 12, 2026, 7:34 AM

Study warns Seattle over-relies on Big Tech; Seattle Times v. Microsoft; Apple’s iPhone Duo echoes the past

This week on the GeekWire Podcast: A study commissioned by the City of Seattle says the city is not in… Read More

Sep 10, 2026, 12:18 PM

Microsoft 2.5: EVP Pavan Davuluri wants to remake Windows for both human and agent users

Pavan Davuluri, who runs Windows and Surface at Microsoft, is rebuilding the operating system so AI agents can run on it alongside people. In the latest installment of GeekWire’s Microsoft 2.5 series, he talks with Mary Jo Foley about the vision for Windows and his commitment to improving quality and reliability. Read More

Sep 9, 2026, 8:33 PM

Prime-time AI: Microsoft Copilot gets a share of the spotlight during Seahawks’ season opener

During the broadcast, NBC play-by-play announcer Mike Tirico pointed out the new Microsoft Surface devices — clad in action green cases, no less — in the Seattle’s coaches’ box above Lumen Field. Read More

Aug 28, 2026, 10:08 AM

Tech Moves: Former Xbox exec named Dolby CEO; Microsoft AI exits; new Fred Hutch leaders

— Marc Whitten, a former Microsoft and Amazon executive, was named president and CEO of San Francisco-based Dolby Laboratories. He… Read More