Amazon Web Services posts $2.88 billion in revenue in Q2 2016, up 58% from last year

Ecommerce company Amazon today disclosed that its Amazon Web Services (AWS) public cloud division generated $2.88 billion in revenue in the second quarter of this year. That’s 58 percent more than AWS generated in the second quarter of 2015. And it’s the most revenue AWS has ever captured in a quarter.

In the past four quarters, AWS has registered $9.94 billion in revenue — not very far off from $10 billion. That said, revenue growth is not as high as it’s been in previous quarters.

AWS brought in $718 million in operating income for the second quarter — the most operating income ever for the business unit — with $2.02 billion in operating expenses, Amazon said in a statement.

Above: Amazon Web Services revenue growth through the years.

Image Credit: Jordan Novet/VentureBeat

Alibaba, Baidu, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and VMware are among AWS’ competitors in the cloud infrastructure business. Samsung recently acquired another AWS competitor, Joyent.

In the second quarter, Amazon promoted Andy Jassy from AWS senior vice president to chief executive of the AWS business.

Also in the quarter AWS launched a larger version of its Snowball hardware for moving data from on-premises data centers to Amazon’s facilities, and AWS expanded the geographical reach of its SNS messaging service. Additionally Salesforce said it had selected AWS as its “preferred” cloud provider and that it would use AWS to start offering the Sales Cloud customer relationship management (CRM) service out of more data center facilities around the world.

In the first quarter of this year, AWS fetched Amazon $2.56 billion in revenue. More than half of Amazon’s operating income. That was true again in this past quarter.

Above: Revenue over the years for Amazon Web Services.

Image Credit: Jordan Novet/VentureBeat

Amazon stock was up more than 2 percent in after-hours trading.