Microsoft on Wednesday reported its quarterly sales grew 18% to $77.7 billion, beating Wall Street expectations while also surprising some investors with the huge amounts of money it is spending to expand its cloud computing infrastructure and meet demand for artificial intelligence tools.

The software maker said it spent nearly $35 billion in the July-September quarter on capital expenditures to support AI and cloud demand, nearly half of that on computer chips and much of the rest related to data center real estate.

That overshadowed Microsoft's report of a 22% increase in quarterly profit to $30.8 billion, or $4.13 per share, which easily beat Wall Street expectations for the period. Microsoft said those results excluded the impacts of money it invested in OpenAI, in an attempt to “he

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