Amazon joined a wave of tech giants surpassing Wall Street's first-quarter expectations on Wednesday, providing fresh evidence that the AI boom continues to reward infrastructure providers.
Amazon Web Services (AWS), driven by its critical role in powering artificial intelligence workloads, posted net sales of $37.6 billion — a 28% year-over-year increase. CEO Andy Jassy noted during the earnings call that this marked the fastest growth rate for AWS in 15 quarters.
"It's very unusual for a business to grow this fast on such a large base," Jassy said. "The last time we saw growth at this clip, AWS was roughly half the size. We've never seen a technology grow as rapidly as AI."
However, the cloud surge comes with soaring capital expenditures. Amazon's capital spending rose significantly as the company invests heavily in data centers, servers, and networking equipment to meet AI demand. Jassy indicated that spending would remain elevated in the near term to support anticipated growth.
The results underscore how the AI gold rush is driving revenue for cloud providers, even as they pour billions into infrastructure to keep pace with demand.