Making Financial Headlines · Page 6

AWS grows 39%, and the cloud race orders more cloud

October 31, 2026 at 6:01 AM EDT · New York time

Amazon Web Services posted 39% revenue growth as rival cloud providers also accelerated. During the quarter, Amazon's cloud business signed deals with Meta and OpenAI, helping revenue exceed consensus expectations. The result adds to evidence of strong demand for rented computing capacity. Cloud services supply computing infrastructure that customers can use without running every system themselves. Artificial intelligence has made access to such capacity especially important, while also raising questions about how much providers must spend to build and maintain it. AWS's growth measures revenue, not the eventual return on every investment in the sector. The deals with Meta and OpenAI show that companies closely associated with AI can also be major customers for another company's infrastructure. That makes the business less like a simple contest between rival brands and more like a network of suppliers, buyers and competitors using one another's services. The cloud industry's favorite promise is that computing can expand to meet demand. Its current challenge is making sure the physical capacity exists to honor that promise. Executives can describe the business in airy terms, but the growth still depends on very tangible machines, buildings and spending. Even the cloud has to pay for the ground beneath it.

Satire. Not factual reporting. Read the original reporting from the linked publishers.