Amazon‘s cloud division has once again helped the company record revenues as the demand for AI and its associated technologies increases.
Revenues for Amazon Web Services (AWS) rose to $26.28 billion in its Q2 2024, surpassing analyst expectations, and generated $9.3 billion in quarterly operating income.
The results mean AWS now makes up 18% of its parent company’s total revenues, as well as 63% of its total income.
AWS capacity rise
The news came as Amazon CEO (and former AWS head) Andy Jassy celebrated the division’s success, highlighting its “multi-billion dollar revenue run rate”.
“The reality right now is that while we’re investing a significant amount in the AI space and [on] infrastructure, we would like to have more capacity than we already have today,” Jassy said on the earnings call. “We have a lot of demand right now, and I think it’s going to be a very, very large business for us.”
AWS has led the global cloud market for some time, despite close rivals Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud running it close with constant improvements and upgrades.
However AWS has also unveiled a host of new updates and expansions recently, including increasing the value of cloud credits available to eligible startups, doubling the amount previously available to help grow and expand their business.
It also claims to have successfully passed its goal of training 29 million people with free cloud computing skills a year earlier than its 2025 deadline, with 31 million individuals from 200 countries apparently having benefitted.
However the company’s success has also led it to face an investigation from the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) over its dominance of the country’s cloud market.
“We’re continuing to make progress on a number of dimensions, but perhaps none more so than the continued reacceleration in AWS growth,” Jassy added.
“As companies continue to modernize their infrastructure and move to the cloud, while also leveraging new Generative AI opportunities, AWS continues to be customers’ top choice as we have much broader functionality, superior security and operational performance, a larger partner ecosystem.”
