Amazon’s cloud business – Amazon Web Services – recorded its strongest quarterly growth in almost three years

this was due to booming demand for computing power related to artificial intelligence. The company’s shares rose about 13 per cent in after-hours trading on Thursday, after Amazon Web Services reported a 20 per cent increase in sales to $33 billion.

Amazon’s total revenues for the three months to the end of September rose 13 per cent to $180.2 billion, while net income rose nearly 40 per cent to $21.2 billion compared to the same period last year.

Amazon ‘s capital expenditure on artificial intelligence infrastructure such as chips and data centres was $34.2 billion in the quarter, higher than the $31.5 billion expected by analysts, bringing the total spent so far this year to $89.9 billion.

AWS has always been Amazon’s ‘golden goose’.

Read also this article on Amazon’s revenue breakdown.