AWS: AI Driving Record Revenues for Cloud Division

The cloud computing industry is experiencing a transformative period, driven by the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. As businesses increasingly migrate their operations to the cloud, they are simultaneously seeking ways to leverage AI to enhance productivity and innovation.

Amid this shifting landscape, Amazon’s cloud division Amazon Web Services (AWS) has helped the company record revenues in the second quarter of 2024, amid increasing demand for AI and its associated technologies.

The company revealed that its Q2 2024 revenues for AWS had risen to US$26.28bn, up 19% year on year, and that it had generated US$9.3bn in quarterly operating income – up 74% from US$5.37bn a year earlier. 

The results mean AWS now makes up 18% of its parent company's total revenues, as well as 63% of its total income.

AWS continues to lead the global cloud market

AWS continues to lead the global cloud market, ahead of rivals Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, and has set out how it plans to power the generative AI (Gen AI) revolution. 

By providing developers and companies with the tools and services they need to build, customise and deploy powerful Gen AI applications, Amazon is positioning itself as a key player in shaping the future of this transformative technology, with Amazon CEO and President Andy Jassy claiming in his annual letter to stockholders that much of this “world-changing AI” will be built on top of AWS.

“Gen AI may be the largest technology transformation since the cloud (which itself, is still in the early stages), and perhaps since the Internet," he said. "Unlike the mass modernisation of on-premises infrastructure to the cloud, where there’s work required to migrate, this Gen AI revolution will be built from the start on top of the cloud. The amount of societal and business benefits from the solutions that will be possible will astound us all.”

The company announced a US$4bn investment in AI start-up Anthropic in 2023 and also revealed Amazon Q, a generative AI-powered assistant empowering businesses to unlock the potential of AI for every employee.

“We’re continuing to make progress on a number of dimensions, but perhaps none more so than the continued reacceleration in AWS growth,” said Jassy. “As companies continue to modernise their infrastructure and move to the cloud, while also leveraging new Generative AI opportunities, AWS continues to be customers’ top choice as we have much broader functionality, superior security and operational performance, a larger partner ecosystem, and AI capabilities like SageMaker for model builders, Bedrock for those leveraging frontier models, Trainium for those where the cost of compute for training and inference matters, and Q for those wanting the most capable GenAI assistant for not just coding, but also software development and business integration.”

AWS’ mission is to help customers build any type of Gen AI application to perform well, but to also be secure and sustainable.

One such example is the AWS partnership with SAP, with both companies announcing an expanded collaboration in May 2024 to enhance cloud ERP experiences and unlock greater enterprise innovation with Gen AI. Both companies seek to make it faster and easier for companies to incorporate Gen AI into their business data.

“Gen AI is going to disrupt and change almost every industry and customer experience in the world,” Matt Garman, CEO of AWS, said in a recent interview. “It’s an area where we have invested heavily, and will continue to do so. AWS is well positioned to build it.”

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