AWS creates more revenue for Amazon than marketplace sellers' fees. It also accounts for 2/3 of all profits (the rest is advertising).
2006, Amazon considered converting its hosting, data storage, and compute cost line item into a profit centre. 20 years later, Amazon Web Services added more revenue than ever, growing 39% and adding $25bn in annualised profits (not revenue!) to Amazon's income statement.
Still, $AMZN stock fell 7% after earnings as the eCommerce and compute giant plans to invest another $ 200bn and more in its rapidly growing AWS business.
The biggest hyperscalers and frontier labs added $300B in revenue in just 12 months. Yet stocks get beaten down due to continued investment in AI infrastructure.
The most impressive fact for me, however, is that Anthropic, a 5-year-old venture built by OpenAI refugees, added more annualised revenue in the last 12 months than most mature, yet fast-growing, hyperscalers.
AWS is a 20-year-old business on a $200B run rate next quarter. Yet frontier lab champion Anthropic added more revenue in the last 12 months than the cloud giant.
Creating this revenue stream has cost Anthropic only $10B in investments, as $132B of its raised capital still sits in its war chest.
Only Google's cloud segment, which is doubling its revenue and approaching the big two, Azure and AWS, added more revenue.