Amazon was one of several tech giants that on Wednesday beat Wall Street’s first-quarter earnings expectations, offering more financial evidence that the AI boom continues to reward companies that supply the picks and shovels.
Amazon’s cloud business is the latest example. Amazon Web Services, buoyed by its role in fueling the AI boom, saw its net sales increase 28% year-over-year, climbing to $37.6 billion, the company said Wednesday. It was the fastest growth rate for AWS in 15 quarters, Amazon president and CEO Andy Jassy said during the company’s earnings call.
Jassy attributed AWS’ success to its role in providing compute to the AI industry.
“It’s very unusual for business to grow this fast on a base this large. The last time we saw growth at this clip, AWS was roughly half the size,” Jassy said. “We’ve never seen a technology grow as rapidly as AI. Amazon is already a leader, and companies continue to choose AWS for AI.”
Jassy compared the business unit’s growth to the aughts. “To put our growth in perspective, three years after AWS launched, it had a $58 million revenue run rate. [During] the first three years of this AI wave, AWS’s AI revenue run rate is over $15 billion — nearly 260 times larger.”
Even as money flows into its cloud business, Amazon is also sinking increasingly large gobs of capital into building out the infrastructure that supports that cloud. Jassy said on Wednesday that capital expenditure growth would continue in the near term.
“The faster AWS grows, the more short-term capex we’ll spend,” he said. “AWS has to lay out cash for land, power, buildings, chips, servers, and networking gear, in advance of when we can monetize it.”
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