Microsoft and Google had their turn this week. On Thursday, the market-leading cloud answered back.
Amazon Web Services revenue rose 39% year over year to $45.98 billion in the third quarter, ahead of the $45.29 billion StreetAccount consensus, CNBC reports. Growth was about 37% in the second quarter, and Amazon says this is AWS’s fastest growth rate in nearly five years. AWS is now running at a $184 billion annualized revenue rate.
Profits are scaling too
AWS operating income climbed 55% to $17.77 billion, beating the $16.97 billion consensus. The unit now accounts for almost 23% of Amazon’s revenue, a record. Across the whole company, Amazon reported net sales of $201.9 billion, up 12%, and operating income of $28.1 billion, its highest operating margin ever at 13.9%.
“Our core compute and storage revenue grew at their fastest rates in several years,” CEO Andy Jassy said on the earnings call. During the quarter, AWS announced plans to expand its Nvidia GPU portfolio, acquired data analysis startup DuckLabs and signed deals with Meta and OpenAI, according to CNBC.
Big promises for 2027 and 2028
Jassy went further than usual on the outlook. He said AWS can grow north of 40% in each of 2027 and 2028 and become a trillion-dollar revenue business in the next five to 10 years.
He also said Amazon will make its Trainium AI training chips available outside AWS starting late in 2027. “With Trainium demand so strong, customers continue encouraging us to make it available outside of AWS,” he said. CNBC notes Google has been doing something similar with its tensor processing units.
The catch
Not everything landed. AP reports Amazon’s overall results came in below Wall Street expectations and its fourth-quarter outlook was cautious. Amazon’s trailing 12-month free cash flow swung to an outflow of $42.4 billion, driven mainly by a $94.8 billion increase in spending on property and equipment, much of it for AI.
The cloud race is also tightening. CNBC points out that Azure is now 72% the size of AWS, up from 58% two years ago.
Why it matters
All three hyperscalers accelerated in the same week. Enterprises are clearly committing serious budget to cloud and AI workloads, and that spending flows through to migration partners, managed service providers, ISVs and security vendors.
For B2B tech sellers, this is a good moment to tighten account targeting around companies expanding on AWS. Firms building on the platform need help with cost control, data engineering, security and AI deployment, and outreach that names those needs tends to get answered.
Sources: Amazon, CNBC, AP News. Written by the xRapid Media LLP team.
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