AWS Cloud Revenue Soars 42% This Quarter

Earnings time! AWS had good numbers to report this third quarter, as the cloud computing business grew 42%, beating Wall Street expectations in the process.

However, overall, this is the ninth straight quarter for Amazon Web Services where its growth has declined. And this deceleration has led analysts to label the company now experience mere high growth, down from hypergrowth.

But such is the reality of the competition these days.

Amazon generated $4.58 billion in cloud sales, and left with $1.17 billion in operating income.

This topped the $4.5 billion average analyst estimate, and more impressively meant that the operating income that the unit generated stood tall compared to the $347 million operating profit that the whole of Amazon managed to generate.

Which is all that more impressive when you consider that AWS only accounted for 10% of the total Amazon revenue this quarter.

At the end of the day, while the growth may be slowing down, there are few enterprise franchises that are operating at a scale of $18 billion a year, while still growing in excess of 40% annually. But this much is clear that the astonishing expansion of the cloud giant over the last decade is now seeing a reduction.

Unsurprising, considering how fast the competitors are catching up to AWS.