Amazon Web Services’ (AWS’s) third-quarter results show the public cloud giant has resumed growing at a pace not seen since 2022, with an annual revenue growth rate of 20.2%, which is reported to be its largest in 11 quarters.
Discussing the company’s results, on a conference call with analysts transcribed by Seeking Alpha, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy used the growth rate figure to cast shade on its competitors, who have also published their financial results in the past few days.
“It’s worth remembering that year-over-year percentage growth is a relative term,” he said. “It is very different having 20% year-over-year growth on a $132bn annualised run rate and to have a higher percentage growth rate on a meaningfully smaller annual revenue, which is the case with our competitors.”
The results also showed that AWS made a profit of $11.4bn during the three months to 30 September 2025, which is up from $10.4bn during Q3 2024, although the company said this figure would have been higher, but does take into consideration “estimated severance costs primarily related to planned role eliminations”, in its financial statement.
As previously reported by Computer Weekly, AWS’s parent company, Amazon.com, outlined plans on 28 October 2025 to lay off 14,000 employees amid an artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled cost-cutting drive. While those job losses will be felt across the company as a whole, not just AWS, Jassy confirmed on the conference call that Amazon has set aside $1.8bm during Q3 to cover its estimated severance costs.
In terms of what’s driving this reinvigorated growth for AWS, he said the company’s backlog of business increased to $200bn by Q3 and does not take into account several unannounced deals it secured in October, which it claims are worth more than its entire Q3 deal volume.
“AWS is gaining momentum,” said Jassy. “Customers want to be running their core and AI workloads in AWS, given its stronger functionality, security and operational performance, and the scale I see in front of us gives me significant confidence in what lies ahead.”
He went on to say that, in its favour, is that AWS has much broader infrastructure functionality, and the “deepest array of capabilities” and “deeper features within those services” than any of its competitors.
“Because of its advantaged capabilities, security, operational performance and customer focus, AWS continues to earn most of the big enterprise and government transformations to the cloud,” continued Jassy.
“As a result, AWS is where the preponderance of company’s data and workloads reside and part of why most companies want to run AI and AWS. To enable customers to do so, we need to have the requisite capacity, and we’ve been focused on accelerating capacity the last several months, adding more than 3.8 gigawatts of power in the past 12 months, more than any other cloud provider.”
To reinforce this point, Jassy said AWS now has double the datacentre power capacity that it had in 2022, and is on track to double this again by 2027. “In the last quarter of this year alone, we expect to add at least another one gigawatt of power,” he said. “This capacity consists of power, datacentre and chips, primarily our custom silicon, Tranium and Nvidia.
“You’re going to see us continue to be very aggressive in investing in capacity because we see the demand,” added Jassy. “As fast as we’re adding capacity right now, we’re monetising it. It’s still quite early and represents an unusual opportunity for customers in AWS.”
