Satya Nadella calls ‘1873’ the book to be read as Microsoft spends $41bn

Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella told analysts on July 29, 2026, that “all of us are reading this 1873 as the book to be read,” according to a transcript of the company’s fiscal fourth-quarter 2026 earnings call. The book is “1873: The Rothschilds, the First Great Depression, and the Making of the Modern World,” a 368-page history of the world’s first global financial crash by Liaquat Ahamed, published by Penguin Press on June 2, 2026. Nadella made the remark in answer to a question about whether the AI industry is building too many data centres – on a call where Microsoft disclosed $41.0 billion of capital expenditure for a single quarter.

In Short

Microsoft’s boss told investors that everyone at the company is reading a history book about a giant railway building boom in the 1860s and 1870s that ended in a crash. The book matters because Microsoft and its rivals are now spending hundreds of billions of dollars on data centres for AI, and many people worry that history…