Business

Alphabet’s latest earnings pleased investors. Revenue from Google Cloud rose by 35%, year on year, and operating profit in the division surged from $266m to $1.9bn, allaying worries about small returns from the huge amount of money that Alphabet is spending on artificial intelligence. Overall net profit increased by 34%, to $26.3bn. Microsoft also reported big increases in revenue and profit on the back of its cloud-computing business. AI services accounted for 12 percentage points of quarterly growth at its data centres.