The disruptive elements of the U.S. Stargate program and the release of the Chinese artificial-intelligence company DeepSeek has put more critical eyes than ever on major AI players like Microsoft In its earnings report after the close on Wednesday,

Microsoft on Wednesday posted disappointing Azure cloud business growth and large artificial intelligence expenses, hitting its shares as a recent surge in low-cost Chinese AI technology threatens to undermine the case for such big spending.

Microsoft said Wednesday that its profit for the October-December quarter grew 10% as it works to capitalize on the huge amounts of money it has spent to advance its artificial intelligence technology.

"Investing 'very heavily' in capital expenditure and infrastructure is going to be a strategic advantage over time," Mark Zuckerberg said.

Meta and Microsoft outperformed in Q4 and Q2 earnings but saw diverging market responses. See why META and MSFT stocks are poised for growth with agentic AI.