Microsoft cloud growth accelerates on back of AI push

Microsoft shares rose as much as 5% in extended trading on Thursday after the software maker issued fiscal third-quarter results that outdid Wall Street's expectations.

Here's how the company did in comparison with the consensus from LSEG:

Microsoft's total revenue grew 17% year over year in the quarter, which ended on March 31, according to a statement. Net income, at $21.94 billion, or $2.94 per share, was up from $18.30 billion, or $2.45 per share in the year-ago quarter.

With respect to guidance, Microsoft's finance chief, Amy Hood, called for $64 billion in revenue for the fiscal fourth quarter, below the $64.5 billion LSEG consensus. Hood's forecast implies an operating margin of 42.3%, ahead of the StreetAccount consensus of 41.5%.

"Currently, near-term AI demand is a bit higher than our available capacity," Hood said. Microsoft has been increasing its capital expenditures to secure Nvidia graphics processing units for training and running artificial intelligence models.

During the fiscal third quarter, Microsoft's Intelligent Cloud segment, including the Azure public cloud, Windows Server, Nuance and GitHub, generated $26.71 billion in revenue. That's up about 21% and more than the $26.26 billion consensus among analysts surveyed by StreetAccount.

Revenue from Azure and other cloud services grew 31%, compared with 30% in the previous quarter. Analysts polled by CNBC had expected 28.8%, while the StreetAccount consensus was 28.6%.

Inside of the Azure growth, 7 percentage points were related to AI, up from 6 points of impact in the previous quarter. Microsoft provides cloud services for the ChatGPT chatbot from startup OpenAI, and companies have been increasingly adopting Azure AI services to develop their own capabilities for summarizing information and writing documents.

The capacity bottleneck cut into the AI portion of Azure growth, Hood said.

Microsoft's GitHub Copilot code-generation tool now has 1.8 million paid subscribers, CEO Satya Nadella said on a conference call with analysts.