Amazon is an internet company, after all

Amazon finally broke out numbers for its cloud services offerings, and they’re huge.

As The New York Times reports:

Amazon said in its first-quarter earnings report that its cloud division, Amazon Web Services, had revenue of $1.57 billion during the first three months of the year. What is more unusual at a company that often reports losses, the cloud business is generating substantial profits. The company said its operating income from AWS was $265 million.

Not only is Amazon very profitable in cloud services– renting storage and processing power on demand– it dwarfs everyone else in the field, including Google, Microsoft, and IBM.

If you take away this part of Amazon, the rest of the company lost about $300M on about $21B in revenue in the first quarter.

From an investor’s perspective, the giant bookstore, the warehouses, the “everything store”, are all an expensive marketing channel for cloud services.

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