Amazon Web Services (AWS) CEO Matt Garman delivers the keynote address at the AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas on December 3, 2024.
Noah Berger | Getty Images
Amazon announced Thursday that revenue from its cloud computing business rose 20% in the third quarter, beating analysts’ expectations.
Amazon Web Services’ revenue totaled $33 billion in the third quarter. Analyst estimates compiled by Street Account were $32.42 billion (up 18.1% from the previous year). Operating profit rose 9% year over year to $11.4 billion, also exceeding expectations and accounting for about two-thirds of Amazon’s total operating profit.
AWS is the world’s leading provider of cloud infrastructure, but faces increasing pressure from competitors google and microsoftalso reported quarterly results this week.
Google’s cloud revenue increased 34% in the third quarter, while Microsoft Azure posted 40% growth.
Amazon’s earnings report comes a little more than a week after AWS suffered an extended outage that lasted more than 15 hours and brought down numerous websites. Microsoft suffered an outage with its Azure cloud and 365 services on Wednesday, hours before its scheduled earnings release.
Amazon on Wednesday officially opened an $11 billion AI data center called Project Rainier. The facility was first announced last year and is intended to train and run models from Claude creator Anthropic. Amazon, which invested $8 billion in Anthropic, announced that the company will use 1 million custom Trainium2 chips by the end of 2025.
The new data center could help Amazon combat the perception that it is missing out on a spate of highly lucrative artificial intelligence deals for its cloud services. Anthropic and Google deepened their cloud partnership last week with a deal worth tens of billions of dollars, while Meta has signed big cloud deals with Google and Oracle in recent months.
Spotlight: Amazon’s $11 billion data center in Indiana goes live
