American multinational technology corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, building software, the Azure cloud, AI platforms (Copilot, Azure AI Foundry), and Surface devices; one of the leading enterprise generative-AI providers.
Microsoft Corporation is a global American technology company founded on April 4, 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, headquartered in Redmond, Washington. It develops one of the broadest IT portfolios in the world: the Windows operating system; the Microsoft 365 productivity suite (Word, Excel, Outlook, Teams); the Microsoft Azure cloud platform (the second-largest public cloud); developer tools (Visual Studio, .NET, TypeScript); the Xbox gaming platform; and Surface devices. Following the acquisitions of LinkedIn (2016, ~$26.2B), GitHub (2018, ~$7.5B), Nuance (2021, ~$19.7B) and Activision Blizzard (2023, ~$68.7B), Microsoft also became a leading player in professional networks, code hosting, healthcare AI, and AAA gaming. Since 2019, Microsoft has been OpenAI's key strategic partner and investor, providing Azure infrastructure and integrating GPT/o-series models across Copilot products. Microsoft AI – led by Mustafa Suleyman since 2024 – owns consumer AI, Copilot, and proprietary Phi models. The company also designs its own AI silicon (Maia accelerators, Cobalt CPUs) and operates Azure AI Foundry for building AI applications and agents. Microsoft employs about 228,000 people (FY2024), is publicly traded on NASDAQ under the MSFT ticker, and maintains a market capitalization of approximately $3 trillion.
Founders
American entrepreneur who co-founded Microsoft with Paul Allen in 1975; founder of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
American entrepreneur and philanthropist (1953–2018), co-founder of Microsoft; founded Vulcan Inc. and the Allen Institute.
Classification
