Amazon Web Services continues to grow quite strongly despite its size, and it crossed an interesting milestone during the third quarter: it contributed $1 billion in operating profit to the overall corporation.
Revenue from the public cloud leader rose 42 percent to $4.6 billion during the quarter, matching the 42 percent growth posted last quarter. AWS continues to defend its turf despite renewed competition from the likes of Microsoft, which also reported earnings Thursday showing Azure revenue grew 90 percent in its first fiscal quarter.
And it’s no surprise that AWS once again kept Amazon.com out of the red during the quarter, a trend that dates back a while. But its operating profit of $1.2 billion jumped 36 percent compared to the previous year, showing that competitive pressures and the massive investments required to maintain a world-class cloud computing platform aren’t taking a toll on its bottom line.
AWS is now on an $18 billion revenue run rate, Chief Financial Officer Brian Olsavsky said on a call with the media following the release of its results. He implied later on a separate call with analysts that AWS would have a fair amount of new stuff to talk about at its big annual conference, Re:Invent, taking place the week after Thanksgiving this year.
(Editor’s note: this post was updated to correct the percentage by which AWS revenue grew during the quarter.)
