“We expect quarterly spend in Q3 and Q4 to remain at similar levels as our Q2 spend.”

In context

“0% in constant currency or to be between $21.65 billion to $21.85 billion and operating expense to grow between 5% and 6% in constant currency or to be between $16.4 billion and $16.5 billion. Other income and expense is expected to be roughly negative $1 billion primarily driven by investments accounted for under the equity method. As a reminder, we do not recognize mark-to-market gains or losses on equity method investments. And lastly, we expect our Q3 effective tax rate to be approximately 18%. Now some additional thoughts on the rest of the fiscal year and beyond. First, FX. With the strengthening of the US dollar since October, we now expect FX to decrease Q4 revenue and COGS growth by more than one point and operating expense growth by roughly one point. Next, capital expenditures. We expect quarterly spend in Q3 and Q4 to remain at similar levels as our Q2 spend. In FY26, we expect to continue investing against strong demand signals including customer contracted backlog we need to deliver against across the entirety of our Microsoft Cloud. However, the growth rate will be lower than FY25 and the mix of spend will begin to shift back to short-lived assets which are more correlated to revenue growth. As a reminder, our long-lived infrastructure investments are fungible, enabling us to remain agile as we meet customer demand globally across our Microsoft Cloud including AI workloads. As always, there can be quarterly spend variability from cloud infrastructure build-outs and the timing of delivery of finance leases. For the full fiscal year, we continue to expect double-digit revenue and operating income growth as we focus on delivering efficiencies”