Amazon Web Services ended 2025 with its strongest quarterly growth rate in more than three years.
The company said Thursday that its cloud services business posted revenue of $35.6 billion in the fourth quarter of 2025. This figure represents a 24% year-over-year increase and the largest growth rate for this business segment in 13 quarters. The annual sales rate in the business segment is $142 billion, according to Amazon. The cloud service also saw an increase in 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 to have 24% year-over-year growth on an annualized basis of $142 billion than to have higher percentage growth on a significantly 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 revenue and capacity than others and expand our leadership position.”
That growth in the fourth quarter was fueled by new deals with Salesforce, BlackRock, Perplexity and the US Air Force, among other companies and government entities.
“More of the top 500 US startups use AWS as their primary cloud provider than the other two providers combined,” said Jassy. “Every day, we’re dramatically simplifying the core computing capacity.”
AWS also added more than a gigawatt of power to its data center network in the fourth quarter.
Jassy said AWS still sees a significant portion of its business coming from enterprises looking to move infrastructure from on-premise to the cloud. Of course, AWS is also seeing a boost from the AI boom, and Jassy credited the top-down AI stack feature.
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“We continue to see customers want to run their AI workloads where the rest of their applications and data are,” said Jassy. “We’re also seeing customers running large AI workloads on AWS, adding to their core AWS footprint as well.”
AWS accounted for 16.6% of Amazon’s $213.4 billion in total revenue in the fourth quarter.
But AWS’s success wasn’t enough to reassure Amazon investors. Amazon shares fell 10% in after-hours trading after investors reacted to the company’s plan to increase capital spending and miss Wall Street’s earnings per share expectations.