AWS Posts Fastest Growth in Over Three Years as Cloud, AI Demand Surge

New York: Amazon Web Services (AWS) ended 2025 on a strong note, delivering its fastest quarterly growth rate in more than three years, even as investor concerns weighed on parent company Amazon’s stock.

The cloud business reported $35.6 billion in revenue for the fourth quarter of 2025, up 24% year-on-year, marking its strongest growth in 13 quarters. Amazon said AWS is now operating at an annualised revenue run rate of $142 billion. Operating income for the unit also climbed to $12.5 billion, compared with $10.6 billion in the same quarter last year.

“It’s very different having 24% year-over-year growth on $142 billion annualized run rate than to have a higher percentage growth on a meaningfully smaller base, which is the case with our competitors,” said Andy Jassy during Amazon’s fourth-quarter earnings call. “We continue to add more incremental revenue and capacity than others, and extend our leadership position.”

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AWS’s quarterly performance was supported by new deals with companies and government bodies including Salesforce, BlackRock, Perplexity, and the U.S. Air Force.

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“More of the top 500 U.S. startups use AWS as their primary cloud provider than the next two providers combined,” Jassy said. “We’re adding significant easy to core computing capacity each day.”

The company added more than one gigawatt of power capacity to its global data centre network during the quarter. Jassy noted that demand continues to come from enterprises migrating from on-premise infrastructure, alongside rising AI workloads, reflecting broader industry trends like the $700 billion AI infrastructure buildout.

“We consistently see customers wanting to run their AI workloads where the rest of their applications and data are,” Jassy said. “We’re also seeing that as customers run large AI workloads on AWS, they’re adding to their core AWS footprint as well,” he added.

AWS contributed 16.6% of Amazon’s total $213.4 billion revenue in the quarter. Despite the strong cloud performance, Amazon shares fell 10% in after-hours trading after the company missed earnings expectations and outlined plans to significantly increase capital spending.