Microsoft Spends $5 Billion Less on Data Centers as Supermicro Raises Revenue Outlook

According to ChainCatcher citing The Information and Bernstein, Microsoft’s third-quarter capital spending was about $5 billion below plan after third-party data centers it intended to lease were delayed. An Iren project in Childress, Texas, was among the causes, deferring some of Microsoft’s spending. Microsoft had announced plans to spend $9.7 billion over five years to lease servers equipped with Nvidia GPUs from Iren. Microsoft also withdrew last month from a planned data center lease with Nscale in the UK over delays in grid access. With its own data center construction unable to meet demand quickly, Microsoft is renting computing capacity from multiple cloud providers. Supermicro reported first-quarter revenue of $19.95 billion, above analysts’ expectations of $16.39 billion, and forecast second-quarter revenue of $19.5 billion to $21.5 billion. It raised its fiscal 2027 revenue outlook to $72 billion to $82 billion, from $65 billion to $72 billion. Bernstein said AI computing demand assessments should account for contract cancellation terms, duration and deployment timing, since projects may be delivered in phases and chip procurement and data center lease agreements may cover the same capacity.