Capitalism can seem so perverse. Take Microsoft, which is celebrating record financial performance by inviting 60,000 employees to consider continuing their careers outside the company . Voluntary redundancy may seem to make sense when a company’s running out of cash, but Microsoft is dripping with the stuff . Redmond’s first quarter for fiscal 2027 was a bonanza for the tech giant. Its Azure business is up over 48 percent y-o-y, revenues are through the roof, and it has so much moolah it returned $10. 2 billion to shareholders in the form of dividends and share repurchases. This latter move probably soothed CEO Satya Nadella, who recently suffered, due to the vagaries of C-suite reimbursement and incentive packages, a 6 percent cut in his pocket money . But as he’s also a stockholder with about 0. 01 percent of the company, his share of the cash return presumably eased the pain. He won’t have been offered redundo. Jenkins, the large wheelbarrow if you please. Microsoft, then, can afford all its employees, each of whom contributed about $1. 5 million to SatNad’s bottom line in the last full fiscal year. The "massive efficiencies and RoI of AI" make a great line for a company flogging magic LLM juice, but the evidence remains elusive. AI is, of course, still the reason. Nothing else matters these days. It’s just that it’s not today’s AI. Among all the fulsome figures it put on display for Q1 2027, analysts noted that Microsoft’s capital expenditure wasn’t as spendy as expected. Quite a lot has been pushed into next calendar year, not because it’s not there to be spent – Microsoft could build a 1:1 scale model of the Vatican filled with robot priests if it wanted – but because so much it wanted to mash the Buy Now button for was "Out of stock. More expected soon." This is bad. MS added 88 datacenters in its most recent full financial year: fiscal 2026. That’s not enough datacenters for a cloud business expected to grow by half again in 2027, and hugely not enough to do the other thing. Lags in the cadence of deforestation, dewatering and detonation of the planet can’t be tolerated. Thus there are contracts signed to get things back on track PDQ, with mucho, mucho, mucho sponduiks. In its most recent Q1 earnings call, Microsoft is hinting, those selfsame analysts say, that it will have to go to the debt market and go into " negative free cash flow " territory in 2028…