By Khac Phu Nguyen
Publication Date: 2026-10-01 23:57:00
This article first appeared on GuruFocus.
Microsoft, the cloud and enterprise-software company (NASDAQ:MSFT), made GPT-6.1 Sol generally available through Foundry, with shares up approximately 0.15% to $513.585 at 12.50pm ET on October 1. The pitch is straightforward: make production AI agents cheaper to run. The investor question is tougher. Will lower prices bring enough extra usage to lift Azure revenue?
Microsoft’s model pricing puts global short-context usage at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, with cached inputs costing $0.10. Longer-context workloads raise those rates to $4 for inputs and $15 for outputs. Regional data-zone deployments add premiums. That makes workload size and deployment location central to the customer’s bill.
Lower token prices need higher consumption to pay off….