Amazon Web Services (AWS) reported revenues of $24.2 billion in the last three months, year-on-year (YoY) growth of 13 percent.
This also represents a 12 percent increase on the third quarter of the year for the market-leading public cloud platform.
"We are now approaching an annualized revenue run rate of $100 billion," said Amazon CEO Andy Jassy. "We watched the incremental revenue added each quarter and in Q4 AWS added more than $1.1 billion in incremental quarter-over-quarter revenue, which on an FX-neutral basis is more than any other cloud provider as far as we can tell."
AWS' operating income was $7.2bn, an increase of $2bn YoY, and the operating margin up 29.6 percent
On a trailing 12-month basis, free cash flow adjusted for finance leases was $35.5 billion, an improvement of $48.3 billion year-over-year.
In 2023, the company's full-year CapEx was $48.4 billion, a decrease of $10.2bn YoY. Jassy put this down to reduced spend on fulfillment and transportation for the e-commerce side of the business. AWS, however, is anticipating its share of infrastructure spending to grow in 2024.
"We anticipate CapEx to increase year-over-year, primarily driven by increased infrastructure CapEx [to] support growth of our AWS business, including additional investments in generative AI and large language models," said Jassy.
"Gen AI is and will continue to be an area of pervasive focus and investment across Amazon, primarily because there are a few initiatives, if any, that give us the chance to reinvent so many of our customer experiences and processes, and we believe it will ultimately drive tens of billions of dollars of revenue for Amazon over the next several years."
Brian Olsavsky, Amazon's CFO also noted that, starting last month, AWS increased the "useful life" of its servers from five to six years. "We will have this anticipated benefit to our operating income of approximately $900 million in Q1," he predicted.
Amazon, unlike Google and Microsoft which saw a hit to their stock value following their recent quarterly results, had its shares jump from $159.28 to a peak of $174.42.
According to new figures from Synergy Research Group, the last quarter saw businesses spend $74bn on cloud services, up 20 percent YoY. AWS continues to dominate market with a 31 percent share, followed by its hyperscale rivals Microsoft Azure (24 percent) and Google Cloud (11 percent).