AWS closes 2025 with its fastest growth in years as cloud demand broadens

Amazon Web Services finished 2025 with its best quarterly growth rate in over three years, driven by resurgent trends in enterprise migration activity and increasing AI workloads. In its fourth-quarter earnings report, Amazon said AWS generated $35.6 billion in revenue, up 24 percent year over year. That marked the unit’s fastest growth pace in 13 quarters and pushed its annualized revenue run rate to $142 billion.

Operating income for the cloud segment also rose, reaching $12.5 billion in the fourth quarter, compared with $10.6 billion during the same period a year earlier. The results suggest that AWS continues to scale profitably even as its revenue base has grown significantly larger than most of its competitors.

During the earnings call, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy emphasized the scale of the growth rather than the percentage alone. He noted that sustaining a 24 percent increase on a business already operating at a $142 billion run rate represents a different challenge than achieving higher growth rates on smaller revenue bases. As a result, AWS continues to add more absolute revenue and capacity each quarter than other major cloud providers.

Several large customer agreements contributed to the quarter’s performance, including deals with Salesforce, BlackRock, Perplexity, and the U.S. Air Force. In addition, Jassy said that AWS remains the primary cloud platform for more than half of the top 500 startups in the United States, outpacing the next two providers combined. At the same time, the company added more than one gigawatt of power capacity to its data center footprint during the quarter, underscoring the infrastructure investment required to support demand.

Although artificial intelligence is one of the major drivers of growth in IT currently, AWS is witnessing consistent migration of enterprises from on-premise to cloud-based systems. According to Jassy, many customers prefer to run AI workloads alongside existing applications and data, which often leads to broader expansion of their AWS environments over time.

Despite the strong performance, AWS accounted for 16.6 percent of Amazon’s total fourth-quarter revenue of $213.4 billion. Investor reaction to the earnings was mixed, however. Amazon shares fell about 10 percent in after-hours trading after the company outlined plans for higher capital expenditures and reported earnings per share below Wall Street expectations.

Even so, the quarter highlighted AWS’s ability to grow at scale, driven by a combination of enterprise demand, infrastructure expansion, and deeper integration of AI workloads into core cloud operations.