It took just an afternoon for the market to forget about Microsoft's (NASDAQ: MSFT) confirmation that it's investing $10 billion into ChatGPT creator and parent company OpenAI. Microsoft reported sputtering overall growth and weakening profit margins as cloud-spending increases decelerated and PC and laptop sales decline. 

Beneath the noise of quarterly financial reports, though, Microsoft's move on OpenAI is an offensive strike against other public cloud giants like Amazon with its AWS and Alphabet's Google Cloud. Is Microsoft now the best artificial-intelligence (AI) stock around for 2023 and beyond?

Despite extreme economic headwinds, it's clear that cloud computing is still growing -- and it will be the primary force behind Microsoft's long-term progress. In its second quarter of fiscal 2023 (the three months ended Dec. 2022), intelligent cloud revenue was up 18% year over year to $21.5 billion.

Continue reading

Source Fool.com