What Amazon’s Growth Shows About AI & Data Centre Demand

E-commerce and cloud computing company reports 20.2% year-on-year growth as CEO Andy Jassy highlights Trainium2 chip subscriptions and data centre expansion

The battle for AI infrastructure dominance is changing the technology sector as companies scramble to build the computing capacity needed to train and deploy advanced models. 

As a result, Amazon has reported growth across its business units in the third quarter –  driven by demand for AI infrastructure that has pushed its cloud computing division to expand at the fastest rate since 2022.

The company increased net sales by 13% to US$180.2bn, compared with US$158.9bn in the third quarter of 2024. 

Andy Jassy, President and CEO of Amazon, attributes the performance to AI-driven improvements rippling through the company’s operations: “We continue to see strong momentum and growth across Amazon as AI drives meaningful improvements in every corner of our business,” he says.

Amazon’s growth journey from AI demand

Amazon Web Services (AWS), the company’s cloud computing division that provides on-demand computing resources and services to businesses and developers, grew 20.2% year-on-year. 

“AWS is growing at a pace we haven’t seen since 2022, re-accelerating to 20.2% year-on-year,” Andy says. 

“We continue to see strong demand in AI and core infrastructure and we’ve been focused on accelerating capacity, adding more than 3.8 gigawatts in the past 12 months.”

The results follow announcements from Microsoft and Google, which both said they would ramp up spending on AI and data centres. 

Amazon reported earnings per share of US$1.95, with North America sales climbing 11% year-over-year and its international segment by 14% year-over-year.

Inside Amazon’s AI features that drive business 

Amazon announced Trainium2 in December 2024, a chip designed for training AI models. 

The chip, which processes the calculations required to teach AI systems to recognise patterns in data, is fully subscribed as of the third quarter. 

The company acknowledges Trainium2 as a multi-billion-dollar business that has grown 150% quarter over quarter.

Amazon also launched Project Rainier, an AI compute cluster containing nearly 500,000 Trainium2 chips to build and deploy Anthropic’s Claude AI models. 

A compute cluster is a network of interconnected processors that work together to perform complex calculations. 

Amazon says Anthropic signed up to use one million of the custom chips, a goal the company aims to reach by the end of 2025.

Meanwhile, Amazon Connect, an AI solution that enables contact centres to provide customer experiences, grew in the third quarter to a US$1bn annualised revenue rate business. 

Other AI features highlighted by Amazon include Help Me Decide, an AI feature that assists customers with purchase decisions, AI agent Transform and Alexa+, which customers are using in multiple areas four times more than the original version.

“In stores, we continue to realise the benefits of innovating in our fulfilment network and we’re on track to deliver to Prime members at the fastest speeds ever again this year –  and expand same-day delivery of perishable groceries to over 2,300 communities with access to Amazon’s Same-Day and Next-Day Delivery,” Andy says.