For weeks, Wall Street had been closely eyeing the performance of Amazon Web Services: Would it rise more than 10% in year-over-year sales?
It did, and then some, on Thursday when Amazon.com Inc.
AMZN,
announced its quarterly results, boosting company shares more than 9% in after-hours trading.
Read more: Amazon beats expectations on domestic e-commerce sales, AWS; stock jumps
Sales for Amazon’s market-leading AWS jumped 12%, to $22.1 billion, offering proof of its “stabilization” after several rough quarters, Jefferies analyst Brent Thill told CNBC late Thursday. More important, it signals healthier days — for now — in the cloud market amid a stampede for generative-AI services and concerns about Amazon’s place in it.
“I am bullish on AWS’s growth,” Amazon Chief Executive Andy Jassy said in a conference call with analysts late Thursday, in which he predicted AWS would become a $100 billion business within several years.
Last week, Microsoft Corp.
MSFT,
said it expected revenue growth from Azure and other cloud services to continue cooling in the current quarter. Meanwhile, Alphabet Inc.’s
GOOGL,
GOOG,
Google Cloud revenue grew 28%, topping Wall Street estimates.
Maribel Lopez, founder and principal analyst at Lopez Research, called Amazon’s cloud revenue “surprising” and resilient despite cost optimization among enterprise buyers. “Upcoming AI workloads should keep [Amazon] in a similar top-line growth trajectory, but the challenge will be keeping the cost to serve down,” she said in an email. “The new chipsets will assist with cost containment. Overall, the AI business will provide a bright light in the cloud market.”
Although Thill and other analysts openly wonder how AWS will adapt in the age of AI, the company’s second-quarter sales figures heartened Amazon’s top boss, who knows a thing or two about the cloud-computing industry.
“Our AWS growth stabilized as customers started shifting from cost optimization to new workload deployment, and AWS has continued to add to its meaningful leadership position in the cloud with a slew of generative AI releases that make it much easier and more cost-effective for companies to train and run models,” the embattled Jassy, who previously ran AWS, said in a statement Thursday, announcing the results.
Underscoring the importance of AWS, it was mentioned 49 times in Amazon’s second-quarter earnings release, mostly cited in customer use cases.
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