Meta vs Microsoft Stock: How Consumer and Business AI Differ

Most people use the same AI in two places every day. In the evening it sits inside the apps where you chat with friends and scroll through videos, and in the morning it sits inside the email, documents and spreadsheets you use at work. The two settings look alike on a screen, yet the money behind them flows in very different ways.

That gap makes two big AI companies hard to compare as shares. One gives its AI away to billions of people and earns from the ads they see. The other charges companies a monthly fee for each worker and rents out the computers that run the models. Both report record spending on data centers, so headline growth or a share price chart hides most of what sets them apart.

The usual way through is to follow each dollar from the customer to the shareholder. You ask who pays, what they pay for and how much of it turns into profit and cash. Then you set the figures for the same months next to each other, which is harder than it sounds when the two companies close their books at different times of year.

Meta Platforms runs Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, and Microsoft sells Windows, Office and Azure cloud computing while owning a large stake in OpenAI. BloFin lists Meta two ways. Trading METAX/USDT Spot gets you the METAX token to keep in your account, while a position in the METAUSDT Perpetual gains when Meta's price moves your way, with leverage on top.

How does Meta stock differ from Microsoft stock?

Meta and Microsoft stock differ mainly in who pays for the AI. Across the 12 months ending June 30, 2026, Microsoft made $331.8 billion, with $214.4 billion from Microsoft Cloud, sold mostly to businesses. Meta made $228.2 billion, almost all from advertisers reaching people on its free apps (source: Microsoft 2026 annual report) (source: Meta 10-Q for the second quarter of 2026).

That puts the cloud at 64.6% of Microsoft's sales. Microsoft also sells search ads through Bing, and that line grew 12% in the year, not counting what it pays partners for the traffic. Even so, search is a small part of a company built on contracts with employers (source: Microsoft 2026 annual report). At Meta, ads made up 97.6% of revenue from April to June 2026, shown to 3.6 billion people a day on average in June (source: Meta Q2 2026 results).

So a Microsoft share rises and falls with how much companies spend on software and computing power. A Meta share rises and falls with how much advertisers spend to reach you. When a business signs a three-year Azure deal, Microsoft knows that money is coming. Meta sells most of its ads in auctions that run all day, and ad budgets can shrink within a single quarter.

Amazon sits on both sides of that divide: like Microsoft it rents cloud computing to other firms, Meta among them, and like Meta it earns from ads, so Meta against Amazon is a match between two ad sellers.

Revenue and margins in the same three months

From April to June 2026, Microsoft's revenue grew 17.7% to $90.0 billion and Meta's grew 28.0% to $60.8 billion. Microsoft kept 45.1% of its revenue as operating profit and Meta kept 30.9%. Those three months are Microsoft's fourth fiscal quarter and Meta's second calendar quarter (source: Microsoft 2026 annual report) (source: Meta Q2 2026 results).

Microsoft's financial year ends on June 30, so its "fiscal 2027" began on July 1, 2026, and its first quarter of fiscal 2027 covers July to September. Meta's year matches the calendar. So when both firms post "first-quarter" results, the months can be half a year apart. Line up the months first, and only then compare the numbers.

To get operating margin, take what a company keeps after paying staff, servers, marketing and its other running costs, then divide that by revenue. Microsoft's 46.8% for the 12 months ending June 30, 2026 means it kept close to half of every sales dollar, while Meta kept a little under two fifths. Meta's quarterly figure was lower because its spending on AI staff and servers grew faster than its sales. It also carried $1.2 billion of severance pay from a job cut of about 8,000 people in May 2026 (source: Meta 10-Q for the second quarter of 2026).

Growth points the other way. Meta's revenue grew faster than Microsoft's in each of the four quarters to June 2026, by between 23.8% and 33.1% a year. The number of ads it showed rose 14% in the April to June quarter alone (source: Meta 10-Q for the second quarter of 2026). Microsoft grew more slowly from a larger base. Even so, its cloud unit, called Intelligent Cloud, grew 30% over the fiscal year to $137.8 billion, with an operating margin of 41.3% (source: Microsoft 2026 annual report).

How Microsoft and Meta make money from AI

Microsoft earns from AI directly. It rents models and computing power to companies through Azure and charges for Copilot inside its software. Azure and other cloud services grew 41% in fiscal 2026, and its backlog of signed business contracts rose 84% to $678 billion (source: Microsoft 2026 annual report). Meta earns from AI indirectly, through better ad targeting inside its own apps.

Microsoft calls that backlog its commercial remaining performance obligation. It is money customers have signed up to pay for work Microsoft has yet to do, so it shows how much future revenue is already locked in. Microsoft expects about 30% of it to turn into revenue over the following twelve months (source: Microsoft 2026 annual report).

Microsoft's AI: OpenAI, Anthropic and its own MAI models

Microsoft spreads its AI across three sources. It owns about 25% of OpenAI on an as-converted basis and holds rights to OpenAI's models for its products (source: Microsoft 2026 annual report). When OpenAI reorganized on October 28, 2025, Microsoft said its holding was worth about $135 billion and that OpenAI had agreed to buy an extra $250 billion of Azure services (source: Microsoft on the OpenAI agreement).

The second source is Anthropic, the maker of the Claude models. On November 18, 2025, Microsoft said it would invest up to $5 billion in Anthropic, which in turn committed to buy $30 billion of Azure computing capacity. Claude models were added to Foundry, Microsoft's catalog where business customers pick and pay for AI models (source: Microsoft on the Anthropic partnership).

The third is its own models, built by a team called Microsoft AI, or MAI. On August 28, 2025 it released MAI-Voice-1 for speech and began public testing of MAI-1-preview, which it called its first foundation model trained end to end (source: Microsoft AI on its first in-house models). On June 2, 2026 it launched seven more, including a reasoning model and a coding model, and said the work was "all about long term self-sufficiency" (source: Microsoft AI on seven new MAI models).

All three end up for sale through Azure. A business that wants OpenAI's newest model, a Claude model or an MAI model can buy it from Microsoft, which earns on the computing power either way.

Meta's AI: Models built for its own apps

Meta builds its models mainly for its own apps and ads. In April 2026 its new lab released Muse Spark, the first of a new series. Meta did not release it openly: it powered the Meta AI app, and developers could reach it only through a private preview for chosen partners. Meta also said it hoped "to open-source future versions of the model" (source: Meta on Muse Spark).

So Meta keeps control of its newest model for now while saying it wants to share later versions. It has since started to charge developers for access to its models (source: TechCrunch), and Meta's Muse AI now includes an agent built on them that Meta hopes to earn from.

Meta also has no public cloud like Azure to sell. It rents computing power from outside providers instead, through Meta's compute deals for rented AI capacity.

Muse and the new Copilot: Two AI agents in September 2026

The clearest picture of the split came seventeen days apart in September 2026. Meta launched Muse, a free personal AI agent for consumers, on September 8. Microsoft introduced a new Copilot for workplaces on September 25, with an agent called Autopilot that keeps working on your tasks while you sleep (source: Meta on Muse) (source: Microsoft on the new Copilot).

Agents go a step past chatbots: you give one a goal, and it takes the steps itself, opening a website, filling in a form or drafting a file, before reporting back. Meta says Muse can book travel and send emails for you, and that it costs nothing for most everyday tasks, with paid tiers for heavier use (source: Meta on Muse).

Microsoft's version lives inside the software employers already pay for. The new Copilot has three parts: Home brings chat and longer tasks together, Code lets staff describe a tool and have Copilot build it, and Autopilot works in the background. Microsoft bills the heavier tasks by use, on top of the Copilot subscription each company buys for its staff (source: Microsoft on the new Copilot).

Say your employer pays for Copilot and you hand Autopilot a weekly sales report. Microsoft earns the seat fee whether or not you use it, then earns again for the computing the agent burns. If you ask Muse to plan a weekend away, you pay nothing for most tasks, and Meta has to earn from subscriptions or from what Muse helps you buy. The same idea, an agent that does work for you, becomes a subscription at one company and a bet on future ad and commerce income at the other. Muse also has to win your time from the chat assistants and video apps that already hold it, part of the wider contest among Meta's competitors.

Meta as a customer of Microsoft's AI

The two companies also do business with each other. Meta spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year on access to AI models through Microsoft's Azure cloud, including OpenAI models bought through Foundry. Bloomberg reported this in August 2026, citing one person familiar with the matter. Neither company commented, so the figure stays a report (source: The Next Web, reporting Bloomberg).

The report said Meta's engineers used OpenAI models from Foundry to test how well Meta's own models work. It also said Meta runs trillions of tokens a week through Azure. Tokens are the chunks of text, often a fraction of a word, that AI services count and bill by the million. The same report said Meta is building its own service for selling access to AI models, which would compete with Foundry (source: The Next Web, reporting Bloomberg).

Meta's technology chief has described the same habit in his own words. In a July 2026 interview, Andrew Bosworth said: "There's also development we do on models we use from Google, Anthropic, or OpenAI" (source: Big Technology). So Meta both builds its own models and rents the rivals' models when that helps it work faster.

For a shareholder, that makes the relationship lopsided. A dollar Meta spends on Foundry is revenue for Microsoft and a cost for Meta. If Meta's own model service grows, it becomes a rival seller to the same developers Microsoft serves.

Microsoft's dependence on OpenAI

OpenAI is both Microsoft's biggest AI partner and one of its biggest risks. During fiscal 2026, Microsoft recorded $24.1 billion of revenue from its deals with OpenAI, including revenue-sharing payments. That is 7.3% of its total revenue, and OpenAI owed it $6.0 billion at year end (source: Microsoft 2026 annual report).

OpenAI also moved Microsoft's profit. Microsoft booked $6.5 billion of net gains on its OpenAI stake during the year, mostly because OpenAI's new structure changed what that stake was worth on paper. That added $0.67 to Microsoft's diluted earnings per share of $17.95, so without those OpenAI investment gains the figure was $17.28 (source: Microsoft 2026 annual report). Diluted earnings per share is profit divided by the share count, including shares the company may still issue to staff. Earnings per share grew 31.6% on the reported figure and 22.3% on that adjusted figure.

The partnership has been rewritten twice since October 2025. In October 2025 Microsoft gave up its right of first refusal to be OpenAI's computing provider, and in April 2026 the two extended the deal again (source: Microsoft on the OpenAI agreement) (source: Microsoft 2026 annual report). Microsoft's own filing warns that "many of these partners compete with us" and that "in some cases, these parties are significant customers of Azure" (source: Microsoft 2026 annual report).

Meta carries a different version of the same risk. It builds its frontier models itself, so the cost of training them and the reward if they work both land on its own books. Microsoft shares part of that upside and that risk with OpenAI, while Meta keeps both.

Capex and free cash flow over the same twelve months

From July 2025 through June 2026, Microsoft spent $115.9 billion on property and equipment and Meta spent $89.3 billion. That was 34.9% of Microsoft's revenue and 39.1% of Meta's. After that spending, Microsoft had $67.0 billion of free cash flow and Meta had $41.0 billion (source: Microsoft 2026 annual report) (source: Meta 10-Q for the second quarter of 2026).

Capex, short for capital expenditure, is cash paid for assets that last many years, such as data centers, servers and chips. Meta spent 68.6% of its operating cash flow that way and Microsoft 63.4% (source: Meta 10-Q for the second quarter of 2026) (source: Microsoft 2026 annual report). Free cash flow here is operating cash flow, the cash the business brings in from its normal work, minus that spending, the same basis for both. Meta's own definition also subtracts principal payments on finance leases, which brings its figure to $37.9 billion (source: Meta Q2 2026 results). Microsoft's spending rose 79.6% on its previous fiscal year (source: Microsoft 2026 annual report).

Leases add a second layer. At June 30, 2026, Microsoft had signed $329.1 billion of leases that had yet to begin, mostly for data centers. Meta had $279.0 billion, plus about $68 billion more signed in July (source: Microsoft 2026 annual report) (source: Meta 10-Q for the second quarter of 2026). Before the July deals, those future rent bills came to about one year of revenue at Microsoft and about 1.2 years at Meta.

Meta's own 2026 forecast puts capex, including principal payments on finance leases, at between $130 billion and $145 billion (source: Meta Q2 2026 results). That range is well above the $89.3 billion of the past twelve months, and Meta's AI capex and cash flow tracks how the yearly figure has climbed. Meta also pays for part of the build through joint ventures with outside investors and through bond sales, the two routes behind how Meta is financing the AI build.

What investors pay and what each company hands back

At the October 20, 2026 close, Microsoft was worth $4.0 trillion and Meta $1.8 trillion, so Microsoft was valued at about 2.2 times Meta. Microsoft traded at 29.6 times its past year's earnings and Meta at 26.2. On forecast earnings the figures were 26.9 and 21.8 (source: Stock Analysis Microsoft statistics) (source: Stock Analysis Meta statistics).

Investors paid more for each dollar of Microsoft's profit, and much more for each dollar of its sales. A higher multiple means buyers are paying up for profits they expect to keep coming, and a large signed backlog makes Microsoft's future revenue easier to see. Each ratio uses a different yardstick, so a share can look cheap on one and dear on another, which is why Meta's P/E ratio and valuation reads them side by side.

The two return cash very differently. Across those same 12 months ending June 30, Microsoft paid $26.4 billion of dividends and spent $22.3 billion on buybacks, together 72.7% of its free cash flow. Meta paid $5.4 billion of dividends and $3.3 billion of buybacks, together 21.2% of its free cash flow. All of those buybacks came in the second half of 2025 (source: Microsoft 2026 annual report) (source: Meta 10-Q for the second quarter of 2026).

That shows up in the share count. Microsoft's fell from 7,434 million to 7,427 million over its fiscal year, a drop of 0.1%, and $40.6 billion of its buyback plan was left (source: Microsoft 2026 annual report). Meta's rose 1.3% to 2,548 million over the same twelve months. Shares paid to staff were added and none were bought back from January to June, leaving $25.0 billion of its plan unused (source: Meta 10-Q for the second quarter of 2026).

Say you put $5,000 into each share at the October 20 close. That buys about 9.40 Microsoft shares at $531.87 and about 7.20 Meta shares at $694.25. At the current dividends of $3.92 and $2.10 a share a year, the Microsoft holding would pay you about $36.85 a year before tax and the Meta holding about $15.12. Both yields sit below 1% a year, so neither share is mainly an income holding, and Meta's dividend is still small next to its spending on data centers.

How the two shares have performed since 2021

Microsoft has led in 2026 and over the past year, and Meta has led over five years. By the October 20, 2026 close, Microsoft's price had gained 10.0% since New Year and 2.9% in twelve months, against 5.2% and a 5.2% fall for Meta. Over five years Meta gained 103.7% and Microsoft 73.0% (source: Yahoo Finance META history) (source: Yahoo Finance MSFT history).

Both companies pay dividends, which these price figures leave out, so a holder's total return was a little higher on each side. In plain money, every $1,000 of Microsoft bought at the October 20, 2021 close had grown to about $1,730 by October 20, 2026, and every $1,000 of Meta to about $2,037. The larger gain came with the larger loss: both shares hit their low on November 3, 2022, but Meta had fallen 74.4% from its November 2021 high and Microsoft 37.6%.

Between August 2025 and June 2026 both shares fell by about a third, at different times. Meta's close dropped 33.5% from its August 12, 2025 peak to its low on March 27, 2026, then rose 32.1% by October 20. Microsoft's dropped 34.9% from October 28, 2025 to June 25, 2026, then rose 50.7% by October 20. A 15.5% jump the day after its July 29 results did much of that work (source: Yahoo Finance META history) (source: Yahoo Finance MSFT history).

That July night shows how far apart the two can move on news about AI spending. Meta's close fell 8.0% the next day as Microsoft's jumped. After the January 28 reports it went the opposite way, a 10.4% gain for Meta beside a 10.0% loss for Microsoft (source: Yahoo Finance META history) (source: Yahoo Finance MSFT history). The two had reported on the same evening at each of their previous four results (source: Microsoft's SEC filing list). On each of those nights, anyone holding Meta past the close took in Microsoft's numbers along with Meta's, one of the risks in trading Meta around earnings.

On BloFin, Meta trades both as the METAX token and as the METAUSDT Perpetual, while Microsoft trades only as the MSFTUSDT Perpetual.

You can follow Meta's price on the METAX/USDT Spot page through both reports, while the METAUSDT Perpetual page adds the funding rate the contract is paying. Both reports land after the close, and outside the Nasdaq session BloFin may accept only position-reducing orders on the METAUSDT Perpetual, which matters for a hedge you plan to open that night (source: BloFin stock futures notice).

How to choose between Meta and Microsoft stock

Choosing between Meta and Microsoft stock comes down to who you want paying for the AI. Microsoft is paid by businesses, through cloud contracts and software seats, and it had $678 billion of signed future revenue at June 30, 2026 while keeping close to half of each sales dollar as operating profit. Meta is paid by advertisers reaching people on free apps, and its revenue grew faster in each of the four quarters to June 2026 (source: Microsoft 2026 annual report) (source: Meta Q2 2026 results).

If contracted revenue and smaller falls matter more to you, Microsoft's record leans that way: its worst drop in the five years to October 2026 was 37.6%, against 74.4% for Meta (source: Yahoo Finance MSFT history) (source: Yahoo Finance META history). If you want more of your return tied to ad growth and to AI models a company builds and keeps for itself, Meta carries that, along with the swings that come with it. Microsoft also hands more cash back, 72.7% of its free cash flow over the past year against 21.2% at Meta. Neither profile tells you which share will do better from here, and BloFin does not publish price targets or forecasts.

The October 2026 results and what to read

This time the two report a week apart. Meta set its third-quarter 2026 results for after the US market close on Wednesday, October 21, 2026. Microsoft set its first-quarter results for fiscal 2027 for after the close on Wednesday, October 28, 2026, with its call at 5.30PM ET (9.30PM UTC) (source: Meta third-quarter 2026 results notice) (source: Microsoft results date notice).

Both reports cover July to September 2026, so for once the quarters line up by name as well as by month. For Meta, the lines that tie back to this comparison are capex against the 2026 range and any sign that Muse or the model service earns money. For Microsoft, they are Azure's growth rate, the size of the backlog and the OpenAI line in other income.

The week between them also matters. A big move in Microsoft on October 29 can still pull Meta's share along, a week after Meta's own report, because both raise the same question of how fast AI spending pays off.

If you already hold Meta, a short perpetual can offset part of that risk, and hedging Meta with the perpetual sets out the sizing and the costs.

Looking to trade Meta or Microsoft through their October reports? To get started, you'll need to first create a BloFin account, fund your account with cryptocurrency, and go to the METAX/USDT Spot trading page, the METAUSDT Perpetual trading page or the MSFTUSDT Perpetual trading page.

Frequently asked questions

How much of Microsoft's and Meta's revenue comes from the US?

Microsoft made $170.8 billion of its fiscal 2026 revenue from US customers, 51.5% of the total. That figure also counts billings to device makers and some multinational firms (source: Microsoft 2026 annual report). Meta made 39.2% of its April to June 2026 revenue in the US and Canada, and Asia-Pacific brought in 26.4%, more than Europe's 23.0% (source: Meta 10-Q for the second quarter of 2026). So about half of Microsoft's sales come from home, while most of Meta's come from advertisers outside North America.

How much money has Microsoft put into OpenAI?

Microsoft has committed $13.0 billion of funding to OpenAI, and $11.9 billion of it had been paid in by June 30, 2026 (source: Microsoft 2026 annual report). It accounts for the stake by the equity method, which means it books its share of OpenAI's gains and losses as other income. That is why OpenAI's fundraising rounds can lift or cut Microsoft's reported profit in a given quarter.

How much do Microsoft and Meta spend on research and development?

Meta spent $71.6 billion on research and development over the year to June 30, 2026, or 31.4% of its revenue (source: Meta 10-Q for the second quarter of 2026). Microsoft spent $35.6 billion in its fiscal 2026, 10.7% of its revenue (source: Microsoft 2026 annual report). That is the money a company puts into building new products and models. Meta spent about twice as much as Microsoft while it brought in about 69% as much revenue.

Does Meta sell its AI models to other companies?

Meta now sells model access to developers through its Meta Model API. Its newest model, Muse Wonder, went on sale there on October 12, 2026 costing $4 for each million tokens you send it and $20 for each million it writes back (source: TechCrunch). Microsoft sells models from OpenAI, Anthropic, its own MAI team and others through Foundry, which had 100,000 customers in July 2026 (source: The Next Web, reporting Bloomberg).

When does Microsoft pay its next dividend?

Microsoft declared a quarterly dividend of $0.98 a share on September 15, 2026, up 8% from $0.91. It is payable on December 10, 2026 to shareholders of record on November 19, 2026 (source: Microsoft dividend announcement). Microsoft also raised it in September 2025, from $0.83 (source: Microsoft 2026 annual report), while Meta has paid $0.525 a quarter since early 2025 (source: Meta 10-Q for the second quarter of 2026).

Researched and written by the BloFin Academy editorial team with AI-assisted drafting. All facts independently verified. Primary sources include Microsoft's 2026 annual report and its posts on OpenAI, Anthropic, MAI and Copilot. They also include Meta's 10-Q, its June quarter results and its posts on Muse, plus both firms' results notices, Stock Analysis, Yahoo Finance and BloFin's stock futures notice. News sources include Bloomberg via The Next Web, Big Technology and TechCrunch, current as of October 21, 2026.

Nothing in this article constitutes financial advice, and nothing in it is a recommendation to buy, sell or hold Meta or Microsoft in any form. Both shares fell about a third between August 2025 and June 2026, and either can move 10% overnight on news about AI spending or on a change in Microsoft's deals with OpenAI. METAX follows Meta's share price, and a leveraged METAUSDT Perpetual position can lose its whole margin in one sharp move. Past performance does not indicate future results. Do your own research and consider your risk tolerance before you trade on BloFin.