Microsoft
US technology company behind Windows, Microsoft 365, Azure and Copilot
Profile
- Country
- United States
- Headquarters
- Redmond, Washington
- Founded
- April 1975 (Albuquerque, New Mexico)
- Founders
- Bill Gates, Paul Allen
- Type
- Public company listed on Nasdaq (MSFT)
Microsoft is a technology company with its headquarters in Redmond, Washington, in the United States. Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded it in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in April 1975. The name combines 'microcomputer' and 'software'. In 1979 it moved to Bellevue, Washington. It was incorporated in 1981 and listed its shares on the stock market in 1986. Today its shares trade on the US Nasdaq stock market under the ticker 'MSFT'. As of October 2026, Satya Nadella is chairman and chief executive (CEO).
Microsoft earns money by selling software and cloud (computing resources rented over the internet) services to businesses and individuals. Its main products include the 'Azure' cloud, the 'Microsoft 365' bundle of work programs, the 'Windows' operating system, the 'XBOX' gaming brand, search advertising on the 'Bing' search engine, the professional social network 'LinkedIn' and the developer service 'GitHub'. From the 2027 financial year, which began in July 2026, it reports its business in two segments: 'Agents and Infra' and 'Devices and Consumer'.
In AI, its main product is its AI assistant 'Copilot', such as 'Microsoft 365 Copilot' built into its work programs. It has worked with OpenAI since 2019 and remains a major OpenAI shareholder. Under an agreement amended in April 2026, it can use OpenAI's model and product technology until 2032, but this right is no longer exclusive. Its in-house team, 'Microsoft AI', released its own AI models, including the reasoning model 'MAI-Thinking-1', in June 2026, and these models are also available on its developer platform, 'Microsoft Foundry'. In January 2026 it also announced 'Maia 200', an AI computing chip it designed itself.
Sources for this profile (8) · as of Oct 22, 2026
- Microsoft Corporation Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2026 · Microsoft / U.S. SEC
- Facts About Microsoft · Microsoft
- Microsoft's timeline, from its birth in 1975 to age 50 · The Seattle Times
- Microsoft turns 50: How it opened up Windows to the future · The National
- Microsoft Corp. Form 8-K, Exhibit 99.1 (updated segment reporting) · Microsoft / U.S. SEC
- The next chapter of the Microsoft–OpenAI partnership · Microsoft
- The next phase of the Microsoft-OpenAI partnership · Microsoft
- Building a hill-climbing machine: Launching seven new MAI models · Microsoft AI
AIMade by AIThis profile was written by AI (Claude) from the 8 sources above (official pages, filings, news reports).How it's made
Records 23
Newest first. Open one to see it with its source.
2026 6
The optimization target of harness engineering has widened from "what to fix" to "what to test". Abstracting failures into patterns to compose the curriculum automatically takes over the place where people used to pick s
A commercial implementation that moves prompt-injection defense down from model alignment to the network boundary. Starting from the premise that agents cannot be kept from being fooled, it keeps data from getting out ev
The operational foundation for agents moving from "running when a person calls them" to "waking up on their own" has become a GA cloud product. It matters that the option of giving agents their own identity came out at t
Shows that as ASR moves to LLM-based architectures, latency and customization of domain vocabulary, not just accuracy, have become competitive axes.
An event that revealed the definition of AGI had really been a contractual and governance device
Made local inference, free of cloud lock-in and per-token billing, an official product line
2025 4
The finished form of a three-way structure of cross-investment and purchasing
Moves any declaration of AGI to confirmation by an independent expert panel, and lifts constraints on raising capital
Adoption reached down to the OS level, and governance began to become multilateral
The first official adoption by a large platform; the turning point from a single vendor's spec to an industry spec
2023 6
The first proposal in the prefill-decode disaggregation line
An early demonstration that FP8 training actually works for large models
An improvement that made ZeRO work even on low-bandwidth clusters
Early work on the idea of textual gradients. Led to TextGrad
Publicly demonstrated that in a live service the system prompt does not work as a line of defense
2022 2
A rebuttal to the challenge BEIR had raised. The starting point of the open-weight embedding race
The moment a training-infrastructure team moved down into inference. The standard for serving large models in the generation before vLLM
2021 3
Freezes the weights and trains only low-rank matrices, cutting trainable parameters to 1/10,000 for GPT-3 175B, with no increase in inference latency
Got around the GPU memory wall by extending into the storage tier. Established the framing that the constraint is bandwidth, not memory
The start of the lineage that lowered the hardware barrier to entry for training large models
2019 1
Removed the memory barrier to 100B-class training
2012 1
Separate industry groups confirmed the same shift (HMM→DNN), and deep learning became the industry standard for speech recognition