Kamal Ghorui
Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott has made a major revelation about Amy Hood’s position as CFO in the company. In an interview with Bloomberg, Scott said, “She is the single person at Microsoft who holds people most accountable.” Hood is trusted by CEO Satya Nadella not just on managing budgets, but on a wide range of business planning decisions, a role many of the software giant’s employees described as closer to that of a chief operating officerAs per the Bloomberg article, Hood became embroiled in controversy at the end of 2024 when she called for a hold on several data centre expansions due to concerns about the accuracy of her company’s forecasts. This turned out to be an expensive mistake. Much of what Microsoft vacated ended up with its competitors, and the AI services segment continued to suffer from a lack of data centre space. During an earnings call in October 2025, Hood said, “I thought we were going to catch up. We are not.”Despite the setback, Hood has kept Microsoft’s margins largely stable even as the company has poured money into AI infrastructure, let go of around 26,000 employees in recent years, and squeezed budgets across divisions. Microsoft, a $2.8 trillion company, has debt that is nearly as reliable as US treasuries.Microsoft CFO Amy Hood faces challenges even as her position within the company remains stable following her controversial decision to slow data center spending in 2024. Despite Microsoft’s early investment in AI through its partnership with OpenAI, the company is now struggling to meet customer demand for computing power, a problem that has worsened in recent months, according to documents reviewed by Bloomberg.
How Microsoft CFO Amy Hood decides on the company’s computing resources
Hood chairs a weekly call with senior leaders to discuss how to allocate the company’s computing resources, particularly Nvidia chips, the report added. Demand from OpenAI, internal product teams, and enterprise sales divisions consistently outstrips supply. Microsoft’s chief commercial officer, Judson Althoff, has raised concerns multiple times during leadership calls with CEO Satya Nadella, arguing that allocation decisions are costing Microsoft ground against rivals. The company’s CTO, Kevin Scott, who previously ran those meetings, acknowledged the difficulty: “That is not a fun job, let me tell you.”Microsoft’s shares have fallen recently amid broader questions about whether AI spending will deliver returns. The company has turned to smaller cloud providers such as CoreWeave and Nscale, committing over $60 billion to such firms to cover near-term capacity gaps, a move that could create new competitors over time. Meanwhile, new Azure subscriptions remain restricted at several key data centre hubs, including in Virginia and Texas, the report adds.Hood, who has been CFO for 13 years, is now overseeing a push to bring new capacity online quickly, including the acquisition of a data centre project in Abilene, Texas, that was abandoned by Oracle and OpenAI.
