Amazon said on Thursday that its cloud division grew revenue 13% year over year in the fourth quarter, exactly in line with analysts’ projections. The company pointed to growing traction in cloud services for artificial intelligence.
Many large technology companies have worked quickly to release new products or update existing ones to capitalize on corporate interest in replicating generative AI capabilities after startup OpenAI introduced the ChatGPT chatbot in late 2023. Amazon Web Services, for its part, introduced the Q chatbot for developers and nontechnical corporate workers, along with the Trainium2 chip for training AI models, in the fourth quarter.
AWS posted $24.20 billion in revenue in the quarter. Analysts polled by StreetAccount had been looking for $24.20 billion. Growth sped up from 12% in the third quarter.
“We expect the acceleration to continue in 2024,” Brian Olsavsky, Amazon’s finance chief, said on a call with reporters.
But at least in the fourth quarter, AWS’ top U.S. challengers continued to grow faster. Revenue from Azure and other cloud services at Microsoft rose 30%, and Alphabet’s Google Cloud revenue, which includes Google Workspace productivity software subscriptions, increased about 26%.
Many companies spent time trying to reduce the amount of money they spent on cloud resources as interest rates moved higher, heightening economic concerns. But that trend has been receding.
“While cost optimization continued to attenuate, larger new deals also accelerated,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, the former head of AWS, said on the company’s earnings call. He said clients are “renewing at larger commitments over longer periods, and migrations are growing.”
The Amazon cloud group turned over $7.17 billion in operating income. That’s up around 38% and above the StreetAccount consensus of $6.93 billion. That means AWS delivered 54% of Amazon’s $13.21 billion in total operating income.
AWS now represents 14% of Amazon’s overall revenue.
At the AWS Reinvent conference in Las Vegas in November, Adam Selipsky, Amazon’s cloud leader since 2021, welcomed Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang to the stage to announce a broadening partnership, which included a cluster of Nvidia graphics processing units that Nvidia and cloud clients can use. Huang has also kept GPUs flowing to Google and Microsoft, among other cloud infrastructure providers.
In a statement, Amazon highlighted AWS AI wins during the quarter from the likes of Accor S.A., Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, Salesforce and The Very Group.
“Gen AI is and will continue to be an area of pervasive focus and investment across Amazon, primarily because there are few initiatives if any that give us the chance to reinvent so many of our customers experiences and processes, and we believe it will ultimately drive tens of billions of dollars of revenue for Amazon over the next several years,” Jassy said on the earnings call.
Starting in January, Amazon is extending the useful life of its servers from five years to six, a change that should boost first-quarter operating income by $900 million, Olsavsky said on the earnings call. Amazon announced similar changes in 2020 and 2022.
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The logo of Japanese company SoftBank Group is seen outside the company’s headquarters in Tokyo on January 22, 2025.
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Shares of SoftBank Group plunged as much as 9.17% Wednesday, as technology stocks in Asia declined, tracking losses in U.S. peers overnight.
The Japanese tech-focused investment firm saw shares drop for a second consecutive session, following its announcement of a $2 billion investment in Intel. Intel shares rose 6.97% to close at $25.31 Tuesday stateside.
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Other Japanese tech stocks also declined, with semiconductor giant Advantest falling as much as 6.27%. Meanwhile, shares in Renesas Electronics and Tokyo Electron were last seen trading 2.46% and 0.75% lower, respectively.
Technology companies in South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong, also fell after U.S. tech stocks dropped overnight spurred by declines in artificial intelligence darling Nvidia‘s shares.
U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is considering the federal government taking equity stakes in semiconductor companies that get funding under the CHIPS Act for building plants in the U.S, sources familiar with the matter told Reuters. The U.S. CHIPS and Science Act seeks to boost the country’s semiconductor industry, scientific research and innovation.
Shares of Taiwanese chip company TSMC and manufacturer Hon Hai Precision Industry — known globally as Foxconn — declined 1.69% and 2.16%, respectively. TSMC manufactures Nvidia’s high-performance graphics processing units that help power large language models, while Foxconn has a strategic partnership with Nvidia to build “AI factories.”
Meanwhile, South Korean tech stocks mostly fell with shares of chipmaker SK Hynix down 3.33%. Samsung Electronics, however, rose 0.75%.
TSMC, Samsung and SK Hynix are among companies that have received funding under the CHIPS Act.
Over in Hong Kong, the Hang Seng Tech index lost 0.87% in early trade.
CEO of Palantir Technologies Alex Karp attends the Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit on the campus of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on July 15, 2025.
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Palantir‘s stock slumped more than 9% on Tuesday, falling for a fifth straight day to continue its pullback from all-time highs.
The artificial intelligence software provider’s stock has slid more than 15% over the last five trading sessions, after a stellar earnings report earlier this month propelled shares to all-time highs. The report was Palantir’s first-ever $1 billion revenue quarter.
Tuesday’s dip coincided with a broader market pullback.
Palantir is the most significant gainer to date in the S&P 500 in 2025, up more than 100%.
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Shares have more than doubled as the company benefits from ongoing AI enthusiasm, scooping up government contracts with President Donald Trump pushing to overhaul agencies.
Palantir’s ascent has pushed the company into a list of top 10 U.S. tech firms and 20 most valuable U.S. companies, while also making shares incredibly expensive to own. Its forward price-to-earnings ratio, which tracks future earnings relative to share price, has soared past 245 times.
By comparison, technology giants such as Microsoft and Apple carry a P/E of nearly 30 times and rake in significantly greater quarterly revenues. Meta‘s and Alphabet‘s P/E ratios hover in the 20s.
The data analytics software vendor said Tuesday that it’s raising a funding round that values the company at over $100 billion. That would make Databricks just the fourth private company to eclipse the $100 billion mark, following SpaceX, ByteDance and OpenAI, according to data from CB Insights.
Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi told CNBC’s Brian Sullivan that the total round will exceed $1 billion. The company was last valued by private investors at $62 billion in a $10 billion financing round late last year.
In June, Databricks executives told investors the company was forecasting $3.7 billion in annualized revenue by July, with 50% year-over-year growth.
Snowflake, one of Databricks’ top rivals, is expected to generate $4.5 billion in revenue for the fiscal year that ends in January, representing annual growth of 25%, according to LSEG. Snowflake currently has a market cap of about $65 billion. Other competitors include cloud providers such as Amazon and Microsoft, which are also Databricks partners.
Ghodsi said he heard from a lot of interested investors following Figma’s IPO late last month. Shares of the design software company more than tripled in their New York Stock Exchange debut, a sign that public investors are seeking out tech offerings after in extended lull in the IPO market.
“My phone was blowing up,” Ghodsi said on Tuesday. “So yes, there’s definitely been a big push from outside.”
Figma shares have since retreated from their initial $115.50 closing price. The stock is trading at about $70, still more than double the $33 IPO price.
Ghodsi said the round will help Databricks invest in products that clients can tap when using artificial intelligence models.
Founded in 2013 and based in San Francisco, Databricks ranked third on CNBC’s 2025 Disruptor 50 list. As of June, the company employed 8,000 people. Existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Insight Partners Thrive Capital and WCM Investment Management are buying shares, a spokesperson said.