Microsoft Shares Rise on Saudi AI Partnership and Software Sector Strength

Microsoft shares rose on Thursday. The company announced a new AI partnership with Saudi Arabia's HUMAIN earlier this week, with broader strength in software stocks adding further momentum.

Microsoft shares climbed steadily. Why is MSFT stock rising?

Microsoft and HUMAIN Announce Long-Term AI Partnership

Microsoft revealed on Wednesday that it is teaming up with HUMAIN, an AI company backed by Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund, to bring AI tools to broader enterprise applications in Saudi Arabia and beyond. At the outset of the collaboration, the alliance will connect HUMAIN's Arabic-language ALLAM model to Microsoft's Foundry platform and 365 Copilot, enabling enterprises to build AI applications tailored specifically for Arabic-speaking users.

Both parties said this is just the first step, with plans to expand cooperation across more models, software tools, hardware, and infrastructure in the future.

To ensure customers actually deploy AI in real-world operations rather than leaving it at the testing stage, HUMAIN's technical staff will work alongside Microsoft's own deployment experts. Microsoft President Brad Smith described the collaboration as combining Microsoft's underlying AI systems with HUMAIN's Arabic-language technical capabilities, aimed at meeting the stricter security and compliance standards typically required by large enterprises and governments.

Moonshot AI in Talks with Microsoft on Revenue Sharing

Separately, Reuters reported that sources familiar with the matter said Chinese startup Moonshot AI is in negotiations with Microsoft, Amazon, and Google to deploy its Kimi K3 model on their respective cloud services in exchange for a share of the resulting revenue. If successful, this would be a rare case of a Chinese AI company reaching such a financial arrangement with major U.S. cloud providers.

Moonshot AI is reportedly seeking nearly 30% of the revenue generated by K3, though negotiations have not yet made significant progress, with disagreements remaining over how revenue will be split, who gets access to which data, and even how usage will be measured. The parties involved declined to comment.

Independent testing has been favorable to K3, with Arena.ai ranking it as a top performer in web interface benchmarks, while Artificial Analysis found it competitive with leading U.S. models on demanding, multi-step complex problems.

Salesforce's Strong Quarter Lifts Software Sector Broadly

Further boosting Microsoft's share price, software stocks saw broad buying after Salesforce's results significantly beat Wall Street's revenue and profit expectations and the company raised its own outlook.

CEO Marc Benioff specifically highlighted that new order growth hit a four-year high, usage of the company's Agentforce product grew sixfold, and Slack bookings saw triple-digit growth, while also announcing a new partnership with Claudeforce, which is linked to Anthropic.

Investors appear to be extending that optimism to the broader tech sector, including Microsoft.

MSFT Shares Move Higher

MSFT stock price action: As of Thursday's writing, Microsoft shares were up 1.05% at $501.49.