Amazon cloud unit beats on revenue and profit as parent company ramps up AI spending

Amazon cloud unit beats on revenue and profit as parent company ramps up AI spending


Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman delivers a keynote address at the AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas on Dec. 2, 2025.

Noah Berger | Amazon Web Services | Getty Images

Amazon said Thursday that revenue from its cloud unit increased almost 24% in the fourth quarter, topping analysts’ estimates.

Amazon Web Services generated $35.58 billion in revenue, according to a statement. Analysts polled by StreetAccount had expected $34.93 billion. AWS represented about 17% of Amazon’s total revenue for the quarter.

Operating income within AWS came to $12.47 billion, more than StreetAccount’s $11.91 billion consensus, accounting for most of its parent company’s profits. AWS’ operating margin widened slightly to 35% from 34.6% in the third quarter.

Amazon leads the cloud infrastructure market, which its introduced almost 20 years ago, but Google and Microsoft have rapidly growing businesses in the space and, according to many analysts, are seeing stronger growth from artificial intelligence services.

On Wednesday, Alphabet said revenue from the Google Cloud group, which includes Google Workspace productivity software bundles along with Google Cloud Platform infrastructure, jumped about 48%, the fastest growth since 2021. Microsoft said last week that revenue from Azure and other cloud services expanded 39%.

During the fourth quarter, AWS introduced Nova Forge, which provides access to Amazon generative AI models during the training stage for advanced customization, and announced a $38 billion spending commitment from OpenAI.

The major cloud providers have all been rushing to offer more AI infrastructure to model builders such as Anthropic and OpenAI. AWS CEO Matt Garman said on Tuesday that AWS added almost 4 gigawatts of computing capacity in 2025.

“Just for perspective, that’s twice what we had 2022, when we were an $80 billion annual run rate business,” Amazon’s CEO, Andy Jassy, said on a conference call with analysts. “We expect to double it again by the end of ’27.”

Last week Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said the software company brought almost a gigawatt online through the fourth quarter.

Amazon foresees $200 billion in 2026 capital expenditures, mainly in AWS, Jassy said. The sum was far above Visible Alpha’s $148.86 billion consensus.

“Some of it is for our core workloads, which are non-AI workloads, because they’re growing at a faster rate than we anticipated,” Jassy said. “But most of it is in AI, and we just have a lot of growth, a lot of demand.”

WATCH: AWS in focus for Amazon earnings

AWS in focus for Amazon earnings



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