Tech titan Amazon sees profit climb as cloud promises boon

Online retail colossus Amazon on Thursday said profit surged in the recently ended quarter on growing sales and more efficient deliveries, with its cloud business promising even better days ahead.

The e-commerce colossus said it made a profit of $9.9 billion on sales that tallied $143.1 billion in the recently ended quarter, with more than half its operating income made from Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud unit.

Google parent Alphabet and computing colossus Microsoft this week reported rising quarterly profits, playing up demand for cloud computing enhanced with artificial intelligence.

Investors, though, had hoped for better performance from Google Cloud causing the company's shares to slip.

While Amazon Web Services (AWS) grew 12 percent when compared to the same quarter a year earlier, the unit's growth lagged that by rival cloud businesses operated by Microsoft and Google.

"I remain very optimistic about AWS," Amazon chief executive Andy Jassy said on an earnings call.

"There's a lot more there for us; then you look at the very substantial, gigantic new generative AI opportunity, which I believe will be tens of billions of dollars in revenue for AWS over the next several years."

Amazon just weeks ago said it would invest up to $4 billion in AI firm Anthropic.

The success of OpenAI's ChatGPT, a chatbot released last year that is able to generate poems, essays and other works with just a short prompt, has led to billions being invested in the field.

Anthropic agreed to use Amazon's chips to develop its next models and to use AWS for "mission critical workloads."

Amazon has already announced it aimed to soup up its Alexa voice assistant with generative AI, which the firm said would allow users...