Microsoft
ACTIVEAmerican 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
Founded 1975 · Redmond, United StatesMicrosoft 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.
Domain of activity
9 areas · 13 technologies · 13 industries- AI platforms
- Cloud AI
- AI infrastructure
- Language models
- Multimodal models
- Agent systems
- Content generation
- AI cybersecurity
- Data analytics
- Agentic AI
- Foundation Models
- Generative AI
- LLM
- Multimodal AI
- NLP
- RAG
- Tool Use
- MLOps
- AI accelerators
- Speech AI
- Computer vision
- Fine-tuning
- Aerospace
- Automotive
- Defense & security
- Education
- Energy
- Finance & banking
- Healthcare
- Industrial manufacturing
- Media & entertainment
- Public sector
- Research & science
- Retail
- Telecommunications
Global presence
HQ Redmond · 5 offices · 6 regionsScale & funding
founded 1975Products & solutions
1 ai systems · 1 ai platforms
Organizational relations
9 strategic relations · 8 brandsStrategic relations
9- Investor inLong-running multi-billion strategic investment in OpenAI (since 2019), incl. exclusive commercial access and Azure hosting.
- Compute partnerPrimary compute provider for OpenAI (Azure).
- AcquisitionAcquisition of GitHub (~$7.5B).2018 →
- AcquisitionAcquisition of LinkedIn (~$26.2B).2016 →
- AcquisitionAcquisition of Activision Blizzard (~$68.7B).2023 →
- AcquisitionAcqui-hire of Inflection AI team (Mustafa Suleyman, Microsoft AI).2024 →
- AcquisitionAcquisition of Nuance Communications (~$19.7B).2021 →
- PartnershipStrategic partnership with NVIDIA (H100/H200/Blackwell in Azure, AI Foundry integrations).
- PartnershipPartnership with AMD (Instinct MI300X in Azure).
Profile & metadata
4 classification · 8 external linksClassification
- Statusactive
- Development stagemature
- Listed onYes
- Organization typeBig Tech
