Amazon’s cloud segment grew faster than analysts had predicted in the second quarter, with revenue increasing almost 37%, marking the strongest expansion since 2021.

The digital commerce company said in a Thursday statement that Amazon Web Services (AWS) generated $42.23 billion in revenue during the June quarter. Analysts surveyed by StreetAccount had been looking for $40.54 billion. The growth rate accelerated from 28% in the first quarter.

AWS’ artificial intelligence business and the unit’s chips each brought in over $25 billion in annualized revenue, more than doubling from last year.

Amazon remains a larger force in cloud computing than any other company. Microsoft said Wednesday that revenue from Azure and other cloud services were growing 43%, compared with 40% in the March quarter. The Windows company touted over $100 billion in revenue from Azure and other cloud services over the past 12 months. The equivalent figure for Amazon is $148.40 billion.

Alphabet said last week that quarterly revenue from Google Cloud surged about 82% to almost $25 billion, after posting 63% growth in the first quarter. Over the past year, the subsidiary now approaches $78 billion.

Following Alphabet’s results, it was “although hard to see anyone matching GOOGL’s pace of sequential dollar revenue growth, which raises the possibility of share shifts that could be a modest investor concern,” Evercore analysts Mark Mahaney and Greg Melich wrote in a Monday note. They recommend buying Amazon stock.

AWS has been lucrative for its parent. The subsidiary collected $16.62 billion in second-quarter operating income, well above StreetAccount’s $13.62 billion consensus. AWS boasted a 36.8% operating margin for the second quarter, while Google Cloud’s was 35.6%. Nearly 61% of Amazon’s overall operating profit now comes from AWS.

Like its peers, Amazon has been racing to open data centers full of artificial intelligence chips that customers demand. Capital expenditures totaled $54.21 billion in the second quarter, up 68% and more than StreetAccount’s $49.35 billion consensus.

In the second quarter, AWS said that it would start to host OpenAI models and that Meta would use hundreds of thousands of its Graviton chips in a three-year deal.

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