Microsoft is nearing a big milestone that solidifies its revival

By Hannah Pedone

Microsoft is close to reclaiming a $4 trillion market cap - and fresh records are also in sight

Microsoft is nearing a $4 trillion market cap for the first time since last October.

Microsoft is closing in on $4 trillion territory for the first time in nearly a year, helping to cap a wild ride that's seen the company find its way back into investors' good graces.

Worth $3.97 trillion as of midday Friday, Microsoft (MSFT) is not only on the verge of recapturing a $4 trillion market capitalization but it is also within a hair of its highest-ever market value. Microsoft was last worth $4 trillion on Oct. 29, 2025, and it hit a peak market cap of $4.029 trillion the day before that, according to Dow Jones Market Data.

Microsoft is the fourth-largest company in the U.S., behind Nvidia (NVDA), Apple (AAPL) and Amazon.com (AMZN).

The round trip since last October encapsulates how Microsoft first fell out of fashion on Wall Street in the face of concerns about its cloud growth and the durability of its software business. Lately, however, investors are seeing those businesses in a fresh light, and Microsoft has re-emerged as a stable software bet at a time when investors are questioning how turbulence at top AI labs could impact the companies that rely on their models and spending.

Shares of Microsoft are up more than 50% from their 2026 low, logged in June.

Microsoft has carved out a niche as a model-agnostic software company, meaning its software offerings aren't tied to one model. It's also sporting a growth story that stands out on Wall Street.

D.A. Davidson analyst Gil Luria told MarketWatch that the acceleration is a big reason for investors' renewed optimism. The company has seen increasing returns on its AI spending, he said.

As long as Microsoft continues to demonstrate healthy cloud growth, AI returns and adoption of its Copilot assistant, the company is likely to continue on its growth trajectory, StoneX analyst Yi Fu Lee told MarketWatch.

Lee added that Microsoft's hardware event earlier this week, which featured an appearance by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang to help show off an AI laptop collaboration, is a prime example of how Microsoft is broadening its AI strategy. At the event, Microsoft touted its Surface laptop, which runs on Nvidia systems and shows how the company is seeking to capitalize on AI beyond just software and the cloud.

More from MarketWatch: Microsoft and Nvidia are teaming up on a supercharged AI laptop

More broadly, investors view the legacy software giant as trustworthy, Argus Research analyst Joseph Bonner told MarketWatch last week.

He said that "corporate America may just have more trust" in Azure and Microsoft's AI harnesses - or the software that enables a large language model to execute tasks and run tools - more "than any of the frontier AI labs."

Shares of Microsoft were up roughly 2% in afternoon action on Friday.

See also: The murky AI milestone that has some of the industry's leading voices increasingly on edge

-Hannah Pedone

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(END) Dow Jones Newswires

10-09-26 1406ET