AWS Delivers $3.6 Billion Revenue, Sees Strong Q1 Growth

Even with a brief outrage during the quarter, the AWS platform fared well. Well enough to record $3.6 billion in revenue, with Amazon planning data center expansions in Sweden, China and France.

The company has reported its financial results for Q1 that ended March 31, 2017.

And the performance of its cloud segment surpassed the expectations of both analysts and rivals, as AWS registered a year-on-year growth of 43%, with revenues topping $3,661 million in the first quarter of this year, compared to $2,566 million in the same quarter of 2016.

Operating income also increased from $640 million in Q1 2016 to $890 million in Q1 2017.

In fact, the Amazon Web Services platform was the overall star of the show, gaining greater strength during the quarter even with a hiccup on March 1 — the downtime lasted hours, breaking the Internet for many, which the company later attributed to a simple typo.

Nevertheless, it’s hard to deny the impact the cloud business has on Amazon. Compare its $890 million operating income to the $596 million the Internet retail giant made on ecommerce business in North America, and the picture becomes clear.

That said, and as feared, the growth is slowing down in certain aspects, particularly when you consider that AWS year-on-year net sales grew 23% in Q1 2017, which is 5% less when compared to Q1 2016.

Anyway, with these results, Amazon confirmed its intentions to open an AWS infrastructure region with three availability zones in Sweden. It will go live in 2018. This, in addition to five other availability zones across two regions in France and China that the company is readying.

These are expected to come online later this year.

AWS currently operates 42 availability zones in 16 infrastructure regions worldwide.