AWS continues to be a major profit center for Amazon and is the dominant public cloud provider in terms of overall market share. Amazon’s most recent earnings report does nothing to change that reality. In fact, AWS generated over $10 billion in revenue for the quarter. Nothing to sneeze at, and is certainly the envy of its competitors.
But that doesn’t change the reality that AWS’s growth continues to slow. The division hasn’t seen its revenue growth increase quarter over quarter for almost two years. And thanks to surges in its retail delivery businesses, it also isn’t the fastest-growing division in the company this quarter, although I suspect that it will return to normal post-COVID (whenever that is).
Azure and GCP are seeing this too. Their declines put growth for both clouds in the mid-40s, so they’re still growing at a faster clip than AWS. But notably, neither has seen consistent slowing like AWS has. Admittedly, they are coming from a lot farther behind, so their larger growth isn’t as surprising.
What’s interesting is that public cloud revenue growth didn’t speed up considering the sudden dependence on cloud services for… well, everything. I wonder if next quarter will also bear out this decline, as organizations begin to fully live with remote work and make plans to continue it for the long term. Or has the public cloud reached a consumer saturation point, that even as existing customers light up new services to spur revenue growth, there just aren’t enough new customers out there to see that growth jump on the quarter?
