Amazon reported a double-digit rise in quarterly revenues as it began to see gains from the “once in a lifetime opportunity” of generative artificial intelligence and strong advertising demand, sending shares higher in after-hours trading on Thursday.
As companies scramble to develop and implement generative AI tools, they are demanding more and more cloud capacity to store their data. That has presented “an unusually large, maybe once in a lifetime opportunity” for Amazon’s cloud business, said Andy Jassy, the company’s chief executive.
Sales at Amazon Web Services, a crucial profit engine for the ecommerce group, were up 19 per cent year on year, to $27.5bn. Jassy said AWS already had a “multibillion-dollar” AI business, which was seeing “triple digit” revenue growth, although he did not give specific figures.