The tech giant’s revenue was up 12 percent to $69.6 billion, but investors are showing their nerves after a long boom for tech stocks.

The UK antitrust regulator has singled out Microsoft for using its dominance in software to stifle rivals in the £9bn UK cloud services market, as the watchdog warned competition “is not working”.

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Microsoft on Wednesday forecast disappointing growth in its cloud computing business, sending its shares down 4.5% in after-hours trading as investors worry about big spending, elusive artificial intelligence revenue and competition from cheaper AI models from China.

Group revenue for Microsoft’s fiscal second quarter ending in December rose 12 per cent from the previous year to a quarterly record of $69.6bn, beating analysts’ expectations for $68.9bn. Net income was up 10 per cent to $24.1bn, ahead of the average estimate of $23.5bn.

Overall Microsoft revenue rises again, with AI tools pushing it forward Annual revenue run rate for Microsoft's AI business is up 175% YoY Microsoft opened two new data center regions last quarter Microsoft revenue climbed a very healthy 12% year-over-year in the final three months of 2024,

CFRA analyst Angelo Zino reaffirmed a Strong Buy rating for Microsoft stock (NASDAQ:MSFT) with a consistent price target of $490.00. Zino adjusted the forecast for Microsoft's earnings per share (EPS) for fiscal year 2025 to $13.

TD Cowen analyst Derrick Wood has maintained their bullish stance on MSFT stock, giving a Buy rating today.Invest with Confidence: Follow

Microsoft spent $22.6bn on capital expenditure in the second quarter of the year, as mammoth spending on artificial intelligence persists. The Seattle-based group said in a blog post earlier this month that this fiscal year it would spend an estimated $80bn to build out the data centre infrastructure necessary to train AI models and deploy applications,

OpenAI says it has found evidence that Chinese artificial intelligence start-up DeepSeek used the US company’s proprietary models to train its own open-source competitor, as concerns grow over a potential breach of intellectual property.

SoftBank is in talks to invest as much as $25bn into OpenAI, in a deal which would make it the ChatGPT maker’s biggest financial backer, as the pair partner on a massive new artificial intelligence infrastructure project.

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