Amazon, the American e-commerce behemoth, has announced a remarkable doubling of its quarterly profits, a feat largely attributed to strategic investments in cloud computing and artificial intelligence.
On Thursday, the company reported a revenue of $148 billion for the second quarter, marking a 10% increase year-over-year, although this figure slightly fell short of analysts’ expectations. Despite this, Amazon’s net profit surged to $13.5 billion, twice as much as the previous year, bolstered by the high margins of its cloud computing operations.
However, Amazon’s stock took a hit, losing over 5% in after-hours trading following the New York Stock Exchange’s close on Thursday.
“We continue to make progress in various areas, particularly with the ongoing re-acceleration of AWS growth,” stated Andy Jassy, Amazon’s CEO, in the company’s earnings release.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) reported a revenue increase of 19%, reaching $26.3 billion. This division contributed $9.3 billion in operating income, accounting for two-thirds of the group’s total operating income of $14.7 billion.
Although Amazon is the global leader in cloud computing, it has lagged behind competitors Microsoft and Google in the realm of generative AI. These rivals are leading the race in developing models and applications capable of generating text, images, and other content from simple natural language prompts.
