Microsoft fell 2.3% after its biggest cloud customer launched a rival to Excel

Microsoft closed at US$521.13 on Wednesday, down 2.3%, while almost everything else in technology rose. Anthropic had spent the morning launching three tools inside Claude: a spreadsheet, a shared whiteboard and a dashboard builder.

So why does that matter to Microsoft? Microsoft 365's cloud business brought in US$27.8 billion last quarter, 17% more than a year earlier. Excel sits in the middle of it. Anthropic's product lead, Nicholas Lin, called the new spreadsheet fairly basic and said Microsoft and Google are still better at serious financial modelling.

The two are tangled together. Anthropic agreed a year ago to buy US$30 billion of computing from Azure, and Microsoft agreed to invest up to US$5 billion in Anthropic.

Chart: Microsoft's sales rose in FY2026. Its value fell. Two scales, both US$bn from zero: revenue in each financial year to June on the left, market value at each year end on the right, FY2022 to FY2026. — This story’s chart of the day.

The listing is a week away. Anthropic has set a range of US$70 to US$78 a share for 825 million shares, which would raise about US$64 billion, and Bloomberg reported on Wednesday that the book is several times oversubscribed.

Seven chip and cloud companies will buy another US$26 billion of non-voting stock at the same price. Nvidia and Google are in for about US$10 billion each, Microsoft for about US$1 billion.

The other side

Anthropic's revenue for the nine months to September was about US$33 billion and its operating loss US$1.26 billion. The net loss of US$104 billion is almost entirely a paper charge on the instruments it used to raise money. I'd want to see how much of the revenue comes from outside the seven companies buying the stock.

This story ran in Memory Regained Thursday 12 November’s edition, with the market snapshot, the other two stories, the numbers and the week ahead. Read the whole edition →

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