Amazon said Thursday that its cloud unit Amazon Web Services grew revenue by around 16% in the first quarter of this year, a slightly more rapid growth than analysts had estimated.
Revenue from AWS totaled $21.35 billion, representing about 17% of Amazon’s overall earnings, according to Amazon’s earnings statement. Analysts surveyed by StreetAccount had anticipated $21.22 billion in revenue. In the fourth quarter of 2022, AWS revenue grew by 20%.
Brian Olsavsky, Amazon’s finance chief, said, “AWS sales and support teams continue to spend much of their time helping customers optimize AWS spend so they can weather this uncertain economy.”
Amazon faces competition from Alphabet, Alibaba, Microsoft, and Oracle but enjoys a comfortable edge in the cloud infrastructure market worldwide.
Recently, Alphabet reported that its Google Cloud unit made a profit of $191 for the first time on record.
Amazon said AWS operating revenue came out to $5.12 billion. AWS has earned a profit for its parent company, Amazon, since 2014.
The operating margin for AWS was the narrowest it is been since 2017.
Adam Selipsky, Amazon’s AWS CEO, said, “Both the size of our business and the size of our team have grown significantly over recent years, driven by customer demand for the cloud and for the unique value AWS provides.”
Selipsky added, “This growth has come quickly as we’ve moved as fast as we could to build what customers have needed. Given this rapid growth, as well as the overall business and macroeconomic climate, it is critical that we focus on identifying and putting our resources behind our top priorities — those things that matter most to customers and that will move the needle for our business.”
