AWS posts $3.53 billion in revenue in Q4 2016, up 47% from last year

Amazon today said that its Amazon Web Services public cloud subsidiary generated $926 million in operating income on $3.53 billion in revenue in the fourth quarter of 2016.

That revenue figure is up 47 percent year over year. Which means revenue growth for the quarter is down slightly sequentially relative to AWS’ third quarter. And revenue growth for AWS is the lowest it’s been in two years.

Above: AWS revenue growth through the years.

Image Credit: Jordan Novet/VentureBeat

The AWS division had $2.43 billion in operating expenditures, Amazon said today in its quarterly earnings statement.

AWS’ top competitors are Microsoft Azure and the Google Cloud Platform. Neither Microsoft nor Google breaks out their cloud infrastructure revenues the way that Amazon does.

In the fourth quarter AWS held its annual re:Invent conference, at which it made several announcements, including the Amazon Lightsail virtual private server (VPS) service, the Amazon Lex bot framework, EC2 virtual machine instances with acceleration from field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), and the Snowmobile truck for transferring large amounts of data to AWS.

Additionally in the quarter there were EC2 and S3 price cuts, and Amazon introduced AWS Managed Services.

Amazon stock was down nearly 4 percent in after-hours trading.