With another strong quarter, Visa and Mastercard position themselves for the AI age

Visa and Mastercard each delivered impressive results this week, offering a glimpse into global spending patterns and the evolution of the payments industry — one that looks, and increasingly functions, like cloud infrastructure.

More on that below, but first, a word on two banger quarters.

Visa and Mastercard both report rising revenue and earnings

Visa’s fiscal fourth-quarter revenue rose 12% over last year to nearly $11 billion, with adjusted EPS up 10%. Payment volumes climbed 9%, while cross-border transactions grew 11% on the back of high-income travelers’ activity and ecommerce transactions, both appearing healthy despite the patchier macro backdrop. The only downbeat note came from a one-time $899 million litigation charge tied to the U.S. interchange-fee antitrust case (ongoing since the mid-2000s, and now among the world's longest-running antitrust cases). Excluding that, costs rose a more modest 13%.

Visa generated nearly $6 billion in free cash flow, raised its dividend 14%, and repurchased nearly $5 billion of stock—maintaining its low-teens earnings-growth outlook.

Mastercard’s numbers came in similarly strong. Net revenue climbed 17% over last year to $9 billion (15% currency-neutral), while adjusted EPS rose 13%. Gross dollar volume increased 9% and cross-border spending 15%. Perhaps most notably, Mastercard’s value-added services and solutions business—which includes cybersecurity, analytics, and some AI-driven commerce tools — grew 25%, far outpacing its core payment network’s 12% gain. Mastercard booked an $83 million litigation provision tied to U.S. liability-shift cases, too. Still, operating margins expanded to nearly 60%, eye-popping even in a lucrative industry.

But are they hyperscalers?

Both companies are now making a canny linguistic — and strategic — pivot.

Visa’s CEO Ryan McInerney is now describing the company as a “hyperscaler across the payments ecosystem,” borrowing language from Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure to reframe Visa as financial infrastructure, not an aging toll collector. Mastercard, though it hasn’t used the term explicitly, is moving in the same direction. CEO Michael Miebach calls Mastercard a “multi-rail network for digital value exchange,” touting its APIs, tokenization systems, and AI tools that link up banks, fintechs, and governments worldwide.

The incentive is clear. Traditional card growth is slowing, while new real-time payment networks and central-bank digital currencies are emerging. By presenting themselves as cloud-scale platforms for money movement, Visa and Mastercard are defending both their rich stock valuations and their continuing relevance. And if Visa is the AWS of payments, Mastercard wants to be its Azure — each building the software and data backbone for the world’s financial traffic. For investors, the “hyperscaler” label signals not just size but staying power. It suggests these companies are less the middlemen of yesterday’s card economy, and now more of an infrastructure layer.

Squint, and the claim looks less grand than it otherwise might. In this age of Bitcoin, a digital yuan, and ChatGPT-based checkouts, money itself is arguably a form of software, and in such a world, Visa and Mastercard really do look like the hyperscalers, or what passes for them in the financial-services and payments space.

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