AWS reports record Q2 revenue

Cloud giant rakes in just under $3bn revenue for the quarter

Cloud and as-a-service giant Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced Q2 revenue of $2.8bn, up from $1.8bn the year before.

The firm declared $718m of this as profit, more than double the $305m reported in the second quarter of 2015.

This was not much lower than the entire profit generated by Amazon.com, which came in at $857m, but from huge revenue of $30.4bn. This was a sizeable increase on the $23.2bn figure from the year-ago quarter, and on the $92m the company made at the same time.

Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos was understandably upbeat on the results, and chose to focus on the firm's push into India as a highlight of the quarter, no doubt because the firm is hopeful of strong future growth in the region.

"It has been a busy few months for Amazon around the world, and particularly in India where we launched a new AWS Region, introduced Prime with unlimited free shipping, and announced that Prime Video is coming soon," he said.

Amazon's results came on the same day that Google reported strong growth with revenue of $21bn and a huge profit of just shy of $6bn for the quarter.

Google also touted cloud growth as one of the areas of success over the past three months, although the firm did not give any specific figure on this part of its business.

However, as AWS is the leader in the public cloud market, Google won't have beaten Amazon.