Amazon Web Services (AWS) is continuing to rake in the dough, regardless of how the wider economy is doing, the company has revealed in its latest financial results,
The cloud hosting giant posted a gob-smacking $19.74 billion in revenue in its second quarter 2022 results, growing 33% year on year.
Profit margins also remained healthy; AWS posted an operating profit of $5.715 billion, a 36% rise year on year.
What's driving growth?
Growth was driven by a number of new clients, including BT, US airline Delta Airlines, and investment bank Jefferies.
The success of AWS contrasts with Amazon's main business, which lost $3.8bn in the second quarter, despite net sales rising 7% year-on-year to reach $121bn.
Chief executive Adam Jassey attributed the losses to "continued inflationary pressures in fuel, energy, and transportation costs", as well as to a return to normal consumer buying patterns post-covid, and costs associated with its purchase of electric vehicle maker Rivian.
The cloud computing market as a whole remains extremely lucrative; in 2023, Gartner predicts end-user spending on public cloud computing will reach nearly $600 billion.
Amazon remains the primary beneficiary the this IT spending boom, controlling about 33% of the market according to Gartner's latest statistics.
Not everyone is thrilled about AWS's success, however.
Microsoft is reportedly preparing to lobby the US government to ensure that large-scale cloud computing contracts are spread out between different vendors, rallying other big players such as Google Cloud and Oracle, if sources reported by the Wall Street Journal are to be believed.
The other main vendors in the space are also reporting huge revenues.
Google Cloud's revenues soared to $6.3 billion in its most recent quarter, up 35% year on year, while Microsoft Azure's revenue surpassed $25 billion for the first time, a year on year rise of 33%.
“AWS continues to grow at a fast pace, and we believe we’re still in the early stages of enterprise and public sector adoption of the cloud,” chief financial officer Brian Olsavsky told analysts on a conference call.
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