Bezos pours cold water on AWS spin-off rumours

Rumours about Amazon potentially offloading cloud arm have circulated for months

Amazon boss Jeff Bezos has moved to silence rumours his company is looking to sell off its Amazon Web Services (AWS) unit.

Some Amazon watchers have lobbied the firm to sell the business cloud unit, claiming the tech giant's three core units - e-commerce, hardware and enterprise cloud - are not interconnected enough.

Back in April, analyst Lior Ronen said the trio are only "weakly connected" and have "no strategic partnerships or linkage points".

Amazon began disclosing AWS' financial performance only this year. When it first publicly opened up on the unit's performance in April, it revealed AWS to be a $5bn cloud giant, "and still growing fast". Last month, the firm announced AWS helped propel it to a surprise profit after sales jumped 81 per cent year on year to $1.82bn (£1.17bn).

In an interview with the Telegraph published over the weekend, Amazon's chief executive Jeff Bezos said separating the business would not be a positive move.

"I think that would be a big distraction and really there would be very little benefit from it," he said.