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AWS revenue rose 12% year over year to $22.1 billion.
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CEO Andy Jassy said cloud cost optimization has slowed.
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Amazon was back in the black, recording a healthy profit after posting a net loss in Q2 2022.
Could the worst of cloud cost optimization be over? Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) seems to think so, or perhaps artificial intelligence (AI) is its unexpected savior. Amazon Web Services (AWS) segment revenue increased 12% year on year to $12.1 billion. While this growth was slower than the 37% growth it posted in Q2 2022, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy indicated the tide may be turning in its favor.
“While customers have continued to optimize during the second quarter, we’ve started seeing more customers shift their focus toward driving innovation and bringing new workloads to the cloud,” Jassy said during an earnings call. “As a result, we’ve seen AWS’ revenue growth rate stabilize during Q2.”
Jassy added AWS (NASDAQ: AMZN) is “investing heavily” in AI, aiming to capture demand for infrastructure needed to train AI, solutions that address privacy concerns related to the data used to train AI and tools to design AI-enabled applications. Jassy said the company is “optimistic” that these efforts will pay off and a majority of AI training and application development will run on AWS in the future.
Financial stats:
- Consolidated revenue of $134.4 billion was up 11% year on year.
- Consolidated net income of $ 6.7 billion rebounded from a net loss of $2 billion in Q2 2022.
- While AWS revenue was up, operating income for the segment fell year on year from $5.7 billion to $5.4 billion.
- The company forecast revenue between $138 billion and $143 billion (representing year on year growth of between 9% and 13%) in Q3 2023.