Google parent Alphabet Inc.’s shares dropped after slower growth in its cloud business contributed to lower-than-expected revenue in the fourth quarter.

CEO Sundar Pichai defended the dramatic increase on a conference call with analysts, who are raising new questions about capital spending.

Alphabet has been spending heavily on an infrastructure development to support AI research and integration into products such as search and cloud services. The majority of capex f

From a purely business financials perspective, a large part of the reason for the sell-off stemmed from slowing growth in data centres revenue. Google’s cloud business is a huge money driver and posted a 30 per cent increase in revenues, totalling nearly $12bn (£9.6bn).

Alphabet shares fell 8% on Wednesday as investors balked at the Google parent's slowing cloud growth and planned $75 billion capital spending for the year, underscoring growing fears over Big Tech's escalating artificial intelligence costs.

Google parent Alphabet Inc. posted fourth-quarter revenue that missed analysts’ expectations as growth in its cloud business slowed. The shares fell more than 8%.