By Leo Sun
Publication Date: 2026-03-17 16:06:00
March 17, 2026, 12:06 p.m. ET
Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), one of the world’s largest tech companies, is a major player in the artificial intelligence (AI) market. It owns 27% of OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, and it blends the start-up’s generative AI tools with other models across its cloud-based services. It’s also integrated its own Copilot AI assistant into most of its products and services.
Yet Microsoft’s stock has only risen about 6% over the past 12 months, even as many other AI stocks delivered double-digit gains. Let’s see why that happened — and why Microsoft is still one of the safest AI stocks you can own in 2026 and beyond.
Microsoft is a balanced play on the AI market
Over the past decade, Microsoft aggressively expanded its cloud and mobile ecosystems to reduce its dependence on locally installed desktop software. It turned Azure into the world’s second-largest cloud infrastructure platform after Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) Web Services (AWS), and transformed its productivity…
