Microsoft Closes at All-Time High on AI Excitement

Microsoft closed Tuesday’s trading session at record highs of $360.53, after renewed excitement about growth from an important partner in artificial intelligence. The 1.12% daily jump gives the technology giant a market value of about $2.68 trillion.

Key U.S. indices all showed gains for the day, with the S&P 500 achieving its seventh-consecutive rise, while Microsoft achieved its eighth. The software company has not been on a streak this hot since January 2021.

At an event in San Francisco this week, Microsoft’s AI partner, OpenAI, introduced several updates, including discounts and plans that enable users to make bespoke versions of the ChatGPT chatbot. 

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was in attendance, and here iterated that developers using OpenAI’s tools to build applications could get a jump on the market by rapidly deploying their software on Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform.

Microsoft has invested a whopping $13 billion in OpenAI, which has granted the company an exclusive license on OpenAI’s GPT-4 large language model. 

In the last few days, Microsoft has revealed the release of an AI add-on for its Office productivity app subscriptions and an assistant in Windows 11. Both are built on OpenAI models.

Analysts are excited about OpenAI’s stock price, saying the latest updates confirm OpenAI’s position as the category leader in artificial intelligence. Market watchers contend that 2024 will be the first year of super-sized returns for firms that have proactively adopted AI technologies and monetized them.