Revenue from Amazon Web Services’ market-leading cloud business crossed $7 billion for the first time during the last quarter of the year, and that business continues to grow at a solid rate.
The $7.4 billion in cloud revenue was a 45 percent jump compared to the previous year, and in line with analyst expectations as noted by CNBC. Operating income for the division was $2.17 billion, up 56 percent compared to last year but up just 4.8 percent compared to the third quarter of 2018.
Amazon’s capital expenditures grew 17 percent during the quarter and the company plans to spend more this year on buildings and equipment to support AWS, said Brian Olsavsky, chief financial officer, on a conference call after the release of the results. Yesterday Microsoft announced that capital expenditures dipped slightly a week after Intel warned that cloud providers were “absorbing capacity” as opposed to adding new computing equipment.
For the full year, AWS revenue was $25.6 billion, a 46 percent increase over 2017 revenue. The company brought two new cloud computing regions online during 2018, and it plans to open four new regions and 12 new availability zones within those regions by the first half of 2020, it said in a release.
[Editor’s note: This post was updated several times as more information became available.]
