It’s a big day for tech giant Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT). You wouldn’t know it to look at the figures today—it’s only up modestly, after all—but it just did something very, very few companies before it have done. In fact, only one. Microsoft is the second company after Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) to be valued at over $3 trillion.
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Microsoft has been around for 48 years, and this is the first time it’s crossed the $3 trillion threshold that only Apple crossed before it. Amazingly, Microsoft hit the $2 trillion mark back in 2020, which suggests that Microsoft could hit $4 trillion sometime around 2026. The biggest reason for this is the recent massive success of Microsoft’s artificial intelligence (AI) developments, including its support for OpenAI and its recent addition of Copilot for Microsoft 365. It also doesn’t hurt that, over the last decade, Microsoft made a series of acquisitions from LinkedIn to GitHub and beyond.
A Process of Ongoing Development
Microsoft’s continuing development is a major contributor to its recent successes. In fact, it’s already working on a whole new way to build artificial intelligence models inexpensively, which should open them up to more users and draw much more interest. Meanwhile, Microsoft also released word that Microsoft Teams now supports both 3D and virtual reality meetings, which is a nice bump up from its standard text-based operations. And with Microsoft’s massive presence in video gaming—it’s got its own console, of course, but it’s also a huge part of PC gaming with Windows—that only helps the company grow.
Is Microsoft a Buy, Sell, or Hold?
Turning to Wall Street, analysts have a Strong Buy consensus rating on MSFT stock based on 35 Buys assigned in the past three months, as indicated by the graphic below. After a 69.06% rally in its share price over the past year, the average MSFT price target of $436.45 per share implies 8.41% upside potential.
