AWS revenue continues to soar as cloud demand remains high
TL;DR
AWS reported strong Q4 2025 results with $35.6B revenue, a 24% YoY increase, driven by new deals and AI demand. Despite growth, Amazon's stock fell due to higher capital expenditures and missed earnings expectations.
Key Takeaways
- •AWS achieved $35.6B in Q4 2025 revenue, marking a 24% YoY growth and its strongest quarterly increase in over three years.
- •The cloud segment's annual revenue run rate is $142B, with operating income rising from $10.6B to $12.5B compared to Q4 2024.
- •Growth was fueled by new agreements with companies like Salesforce and government entities, plus AI-driven demand and AWS's comprehensive AI stack.
- •AWS holds a leadership position, with more top U.S. startups using it than the next two providers combined, and continues to expand data center capacity.
- •Despite AWS's success, Amazon's stock dropped 10% after-hours due to increased capital expenditures and missed earnings per share targets.
Amazon Web Services ended 2025 with its strongest quarterly growth rate in more than three years.
The company reported Thursday that its cloud service business recorded $35.6 billion in revenue in the fourth quarter of 2025. This figure marks a 24% year-on-year increase and the business segment’s largest growth rate in 13 quarters. Annual revenue run rate for the business segment is $142 billion, according to Amazon. The cloud service also saw an increase in its operating income from $12.5 billion in the fourth quarter compared to $10.6 billion in the same period in 2024.
“It’s very different having 24% year-over-year growth on $142 billion annualized run rate than to have a higher percentage growth on a meaningfully smaller base, which is the case with our competitors,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said during the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call. “We continue to add more incremental revenue and capacity than others, and extend our leadership position.”
That fourth-quarter growth was fueled by new agreements with Salesforce, BlackRock, Perplexity, and the U.S. Air Force, among other companies and government entities.
“More of the top 500 U.S. startups use AWS as their primary cloud provider than the next two providers combined,” Jassy said. “We’re adding significant easy to core computing capacity each day.”
AWS also added more than a gigawatt of power to its data center network in the fourth quarter.
Jassy said AWS still sees a fair amount of its business coming from enterprises that want to move infrastructure from on-premise to the cloud. AWS is, of course, also seeing a boost from the AI boom, and Jassy credited AWS’s top-to-bottom AI stack functionality.
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“We consistently see customers wanting to run their AI workloads where the rest of their applications and data are,” Jassy said. “We’re also seeing that as customers run large AI workloads on AWS, they’re adding to their core AWS footprint as well.”
AWS made up 16.6% of Amazon’s overall $213.4 billion revenue in the fourth quarter.
AWS’s success wasn’t enough to appease Amazon investors, however. Amazon shares fell 10% in after-hours trading after investors reacted to the company’s plan to boost capital expenditures and missed Wall Street’s expectations on earnings per share.