Microsoft Stocks Slip Although $600 Target Meets an Unfinished AI Model Khac Phu Nguyen Fri, October 16, 2026 at 1:44 PM EDT MSFT -2.35% Trade MSFT on Coinbase Trading disclosure Trading disclosure The above button links to Coinbase. Yahoo Finance is not a broker-dealer or investment adviser and does not offer securities or cryptocurrencies for sale or facilitate trading. Coinbase pays us for certain activity generated through this link. Prices displayed are informational.
Microsoft, the cloud and enterprise-software group (NASDAQ:MSFT), faces a clear test: turn stronger in-house AI into stronger business returns. The October 16 quote of $536.545 puts shares down approximately 0.54% against the $539.44 previous close listed by Stock Analysis, although the updated quote has no verified intraday timestamp. The Fly reported that StoneX analyst Yi Fu Lee raised his price target to $600 from $525 and maintained Buy. That is a bigger valuation call. Microsoft still needs to deliver the operating results behind it.
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Microsoft disclosed on October 15 that MAI-Base-2 has completed pre-training, with 2.8 trillion total parameters and 80 billion active parameters. The company says it trained the model using 16,000 GB200 GPUs over 38 days. Those figures show the scale of the effort. They do not establish commercial availability, paying demand or lower costs for serving customers. Owning more of the model pipeline could give Microsoft greater control over its AI products and economics, but the financial payoff remains an execution question.
The valuation snapshot places shares 9.58% below the $593.39 GF Value estimate, suggesting a valuation cushion rather than a guaranteed return. StoneX's target increase is 14.3%; that measures the change in its target, not expected earnings growth. The next hurdle is concrete: deploy the technology into paid workloads and show what happens to revenue, margins and cash flow. Better model performance strengthens the technology case. Investors need evidence that it strengthens the business case, too.
