Investors are starting to get jittery about the cost of Microsoft’s push to persuade enterprise customers to adopt expensive generative AI applications and agents. While the company announced strong quarterly numbers on Wednesday,

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

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.

Microsoft on Wednesday reported profits of $24.1 billion in the recently ended quarter, but shares slid on worries over its vital cloud computing business. Microsoft revenue grew to $69.6 billion and the amount of money taken in by its "intelligence cloud" unit climbed to $25.

By Deborah Mary Sophia and Joel Jose (Reuters) -Investors punished Microsoft with a 6% share drop on Thursday as hefty AI bets failed to drive a big increase in its cloud revenue, while Meta rose 4% after CEO Mark Zuckerberg assured Wall Street about growth with promises of a "really big year".