Amazon Web Services posts $1.8B in revenue in Q2 2015, up 81% from last year

E-commerce heavyweight Amazon today disclosed in its quarterly earnings statement that its subsidiary Amazon Web Services (AWS), the biggest public cloud currently available, generated $1.82 billion in revenue in the second quarter of 2015. That means revenue grew by 81 percent year over year — a surprisingly high growth rate.

For the year that ended on June 30, the cloud brought in $5.97 billion.

Operating income for the quarter was $491 million, up 407 percent over last year. Operating expenses for the quarter came out to $1.43 billion, up 54 percent.

This marks the second quarter that Amazon has broken out financial figures for AWS. The first time, just three months ago, Amazon revealed that AWS had generated more than $5 billion in annual revenue.

While Amazon has been the leader of the cloud infrastructure market for years, it faces competition from many directions, including Google and Microsoft, but also, more recently, Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, with its growing Aliyun cloud.

Microsoft, Google, IBM, and others have been striving to roll out more features that can help them compete with Amazon more effectively. But Amazon continues to benefit from scale. AWS advertises on its website that it has more than 1 million active customers.

Here’s a chart showing AWS revenue growth in recent quarters compared with the numbers Amazon previously disclosed in order to ballpark Amazon revenue, the “Other” category for North America revenue:

Above: Amazon Web Services revenue growth, updated for 2Q15.

Image Credit: Jordan Novet/VentureBeat

And here’s a chart of revenue generally, along with the old “Other” (North America) numbers:

Above: Amazon Web Services revenue, updated for 2Q15.

Image Credit: Jordan Novet/VentureBeat

These numbers are impressive — and they set a high bar for Amazon to beat in subsequent quarters.

Amazon stock was up a whopping 18 percent after the earnings release.