Microsoft said Wednesday that annual revenue for its flagship Azure cloud computing platform has surpassed $75 billion, up 34% from a year earlier.

The Azure cloud business is a centerpiece of Microsoft's efforts to shift its focus to artificial intelligence, but until Wednesday the company hadn't disclosed how much money it makes.

The revelation came in the software giant's end-of-year earnings report, one that also showed a 24% spike in the company's quarterly profit that beat Wall Street expectations and pleased investors wary about Microsoft's ongoing construction of costly new data centers needed to meet cloud computing and AI demand.

“We continue to scale our own data center capacity faster than any other competitor,” CEO Satya Nadella said on an investor call, boasting that the c

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