Amazon’s stock price jumped more than 9% in after-hours trading on Thursday after the retail-and-AI giant reported second-quarter results buoyed by its Amazon Web Services cloud business, which is racing faster ahead than it has in more than four years.
The cloud unit posted $42.2 billion in revenue in Q2, up 37% from $30.9 billion a year ago, marking its fastest growth in 18 quarters, and what Amazon CEO Andy Jassy called its fifth consecutive quarter of accelerating growth. AWS added more than $4.6 billion in revenue quarter over quarter, and AWS operating income hit $16.6 billion, up 64% from $10.2 billion a year ago, on a 39.4% margin, up from 32.9% in the same period a year ago. AWS backlog—customer agreements representing future revenue—grew to $496 billion.
