Markets are getting twitchy about Vole’s AI spending, and Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman is not pretending otherwise.
The software king of the world, Microsoft, and Big AI firms have been piling into capital spending at a rate that has rattled investors who now want to see revenue, not just bigger data centres.
Microsoft’s stock has taken a hit alongside the broader nerves, as the cocaine nose jobs of Wall Street try to work out whether the numbers will ever land.
Microsoft AI Tsar Mustafa Suleyman told the FT: “I think that there’s no question these are unprecedented times.” He argued that the next five years will be hard for markets to price.
Suleyman cast the current surge as another technology cycle, saying companies sometimes need outsized moves to catch the biggest waves.
He said this wave is different because it aims to build intelligence itself, and he claimed that progress over the last two to three years has been “eye-watering.”
Suleyman tied that progress directly to compute, arguing there is “a very direct and unequivocal relationship” between more flops and stronger model capability.
“Over the last 15 years, there’s been a $1tn-fold increase in training compute. In the next three years or so, there will be a further 1,000X increase in training compute,” Suleyman said.
The result is models that can code better than most human coders, with some well-known developers publicly using them to generate new code.
Suleyman said that scale of capability “justifies unprecedented spend,” even if markets keep fretting about timelines.
He did not promise quick relief, saying, “I think markets are markets. They’re sort of trying to figure it out.”
Suleyman said he has “no doubt” the returns will compound into revenue and profit, but he left the schedule hanging.
He positioned Microsoft’s push as a long-term bet on building intelligence at an industrial scale, with spending driven by model performance gains rather than neat quarterly narratives.
