The world’s biggest cloud provider is growing hard again: AWS has returned to growth levels not seen since 2022, said Amazon CEO Andy Jassy – citing demand for AI workloads and the growing number of “enterprises who have gotten back to moving from on-premises infrastructure to the cloud.”

AWS boss Matt Garman meanwhile suggested that AWS’s managed AI service Bedrock (where users can pick the LLM they want to run) “could be as big a business for AWS as EC2” – long AWS’s bread-and-butter. ("Amazon EC2 gives you access to a virtual computing environment. Your applications run on a “virtual CPU”! an excited Jeff Barr wrote way back in 2006.)

The majority of token usage in Bedrock is already running on AWS’s custom Trainium silicon, Garman added in a LinkedIn post on Thursday – as Jassy talked up a brace of new AWS propositions, Strands, and AgentCore, designed to help organisations build out agentic workloads.

"The inspiration behind AgentCore was to build another set of primitive building blocks like we built in the early days of AWS, where it was compute and storage and database. We defined a set of building blocks that you needed to be able to deploy agents securely and scalably that we provide in AgentCore. And then when we talk to our customers, it really resonates. There is not anything else like it, it's changing their time frame and their receptivity to building agents, and it's very compelling for them." Amazon CEO Andy Jassy

AWS power to triple in 5 years

Speaking on a Q3 earnings call on October 30, Jassy said that AWS has added 3.8 GW of capacity in the past 12 months and is “double the power capacity that AWS was in 2022, and on track to double again by 2027.”

He told analysts: “We're bringing in quite a bit of capacity today. Overall in the industry, maybe the bottleneck is power.

"I think at some point, it may move to chips, but we're bringing in quite a bit of capacity… And as fast as we're bringing in right now, we are monetizing it,” he added.

See also: Equinix turns to nebulous nukes for 750MW of maybe power

Boy, is it monetising it: Revenue was $33 billion, up 20.2% year-over-year. AWS added $2.1 billion in revenue quarter-on-quarter“driven by strong growth across both our AI and core services and more capacity, which has come online to support customer demand” said CFO Brian Olsavsky. 

AWS is now a $132 billion run-rate entity. 

Credit: Amazon's Q3 investor presentation.

Hard numbers. Among the hardest for many staff, of course, 14,000: Amazon has hired heavily in recent years and is now retrenching – that’s the number of layoffs announced at Amazon earlier this week. 

Jassy said that severance costs were $1.8 billion in the quarter and that they were “recorded primarily in the technology and infrastructure, sales and marketing and general and administrative expense line items.” 

More broadly, outside AWS, further automation is looming.

“I think you're going to continue to see us invest very significantly in robotics,” he told analysts: “It's going to help on the safety, the productivity, the speed and ultimately some of the cost pieces, which will allow us to continue to improve the customer experience.”

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