AWS growth accelerates in Q2 as Covid accelerates cloud adoption

Business logs 37 per cent revenue growth in second quarter, after achieving 32 per cent in Q1

AWS' growth rate has accelerated in Q2 as the firm claims that more customers are looking to save money by moving to the cloud.

Amazon's cloud business grew revenues by 37 per cent in the three months ending 30 June to $14.81bn.

It marks an acceleration from its Q1 growth rates, which achieved 32 per cent growth to $13.5bn.

According to CFO Brian Olsavsky, AWS is now a $59bn run rate, business - up from $52bn as reported by founder Jeff Bezos after publishing its Q1 results and from $43bn in Q2 of 2020.

Despite the strong performance, AWS was outpaced by its two closest competitors - Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud - during the three-month period.

Microsoft's Azure business grew by 51 per cent during the same time frame, while Google Cloud grew by 54 per cent to $4.6bn.

The AWS business represented 13 per cent of Amazon's overall sales mix during the quarter.

Speaking to investors, Olsavsky said that Covid is causing customers to reassess their IT infrastructure.

He said that, pre-pandemic, AWS was averaging 20 per cent revenue growth rates, which jumped to the mid-30s once lockdowns began in March.

"AWS customers recognize that the move to the cloud is very positive for their businesses, in the medium and long term. Disruptive economic events like COVID have cause many people to step back and think about how they want to change strategically," he said.

"And many of come to the conclusion that they do not want to own and run their own datacenters. They assume they can save money and gain agility and innovation by moving to AWS."