Microsoft Corp. reported fiscal third-quarter earnings after the market close Wednesday that surpassed Wall Street estimates on revenue, operating income and the closely watched Azure cloud growth rate, and lifted its full-year capital expenditure guidance to $96 billion from a January range of $84 billion to $88 billion — the clearest signal yet that the collapse of the federal artificial-intelligence moratorium has not slowed the industry’s spending plans.

The Redmond, Wash., company posted revenue of $74.8 billion, up 14 percent from a year earlier, against a consensus estimate of $72.6 billion. Diluted earnings per share came in at $3.41, ahead of the $3.22 expected by analysts polled by Visible Alpha. Azure and other cloud services grew 32 percent in constant currency, with the company breaking out for the first time that Azure AI services — the slice of cloud revenue tied directly to GPU-backed inference and training workloads — grew 41 percent year over year and now represents roughly a quarter of total Azure revenue.

Shares jumped about 5.2 percent in after-hours trading, lifting the broader Nasdaq 100 futures and the shares of Microsoft’s largest GPU supplier, Nvidia Corp., which rose 3.4 percent in extended trading. Alphabet Inc. is scheduled to report Thursday afternoon, and traders said the Microsoft print had reset the bar for the rest of the megacap cycle.

“This is the first quarter in which we are reporting Azure AI as a distinct revenue line because it is now large enough to matter to the model, and our customers want the disclosure,” Chief Executive Satya Nadella said on the post-earnings conference call. “Demand is well ahead of supply. We are committing the capital we need to commit to close that gap.”

Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood used the call to walk investors through the higher capex figure, which she said reflected pull-forward commitments to nuclear, gas-with-capture and grid investments first detailed by the company over the weekend, along with incremental GPU purchases ordered after the moratorium bill died in the House Ways and Means Committee on April 22. About $14 billion of the increase, she said, was attributable to “long-duration power and grid commitments that we expect to recover over fifteen-to-twenty-year contracted terms.”

The pivot to itemizing energy spending was new. Until this quarter, Microsoft had bundled data-center construction, server hardware and power-purchase agreements into a single capital-expenditure figure. Hood said the company would now report a “data-center construction and energy” subtotal each quarter, an apparent attempt to demonstrate to state regulators in New York, California and Virginia — all of which have launched reviews of large new interconnections — that the company is matching new compute load with new contracted clean generation.

“They are essentially showing their work,” said Mark Moerdler, an analyst at Bernstein. “If you can point to a specific power purchase agreement attached to a specific campus, then the political argument that hyperscalers are free-riding on residential ratepayers becomes a lot harder to make. That is as much a regulatory disclosure as it is a financial one.”

The earnings followed weeks of acute uncertainty for the cloud industry. The Senate’s surprise 52-48 passage of the Sanders-Ocasio-Cortez moratorium on April 7 had triggered emergency board meetings across the sector and forced Wall Street to trim AI capex forecasts for the full year. The House committee defeat two weeks later removed that overhang, but the rapid pivot by Govs. Kathy Hochul of New York and Gavin Newsom of California toward state-level pauses left investors uncertain how aggressively hyperscalers would commit fresh capital. Wednesday’s print appears to have answered that question.

Within Azure, Microsoft said growth was broad-based but tilted toward inference workloads — the customer-facing serving of large language models — rather than training. Nadella said training demand remained “robust” but that inference now represented “the dominant share of new GPU consumption” on the platform, a shift the company attributed to the maturation of enterprise deployments and to a wave of customers moving generative AI features from pilots into general availability.

Microsoft 365 Copilot, the company’s flagship enterprise AI product, passed 18 million paid seats in the quarter, up from roughly 11 million at the end of the December quarter, Hood said. The company declined to break out Copilot revenue but said the product was “comfortably accretive to overall commercial cloud gross margin,” a metric some analysts had questioned given the high cost of inference.

Not every line was clean. Personal computing revenue grew just 4 percent, dragged by a slower Windows OEM cycle as enterprise PC buyers held off ahead of an expected refresh wave tied to a new generation of AI-capable chips. LinkedIn revenue growth slowed to 6 percent from 9 percent a quarter earlier, which the company attributed to softer hiring in technology and finance. Gaming revenue was roughly flat year over year.

Reaction in Washington was muted but pointed. A spokesperson for Sen. Bernie Sanders, asked about the earnings late Wednesday, said the results “make exactly the case we were making — these companies have unlimited capital to build whatever they want, wherever they want, and ordinary ratepayers are about to pay for it.” A senior aide to Hochul said the governor’s office had taken note of Microsoft’s new disclosure framework but that the planned New York executive order on hyperscale interconnections would proceed on schedule.

Industry analysts said the more consequential read of the quarter was for Microsoft’s suppliers. Nvidia, which reports May 21, is widely expected to benefit directly from the raised Microsoft capex, as are the memory makers SK Hynix and Micron, and the power-equipment vendors Eaton and Vertiv. “If you wanted a green light for the AI capex thesis going into the back half of the year, you just got one,” said Stacy Rasgon of Bernstein. “The political risk is not gone, but the spending is not waiting.”

The company guided to fiscal fourth-quarter revenue of $77 billion to $78.5 billion, ahead of consensus, and said its full-year capex run rate would be “approximately stable, with modest upward bias” into fiscal 2027. Microsoft executives said additional clean-energy and grid-investment announcements tied to the higher capex figure would be made in the coming weeks alongside individual data-center site approvals.