The biggest source of the company’s profits is Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing business that started just over a decade ago and is now on track to bring in more than $10 billion a year in revenue. A.W.S., as the business is known, is the most popular cloud service for start-ups and for a growing number of big companies that want to rent computing capacity, rather than run their own hardware and software.
Cloud computing is also much more profitable than Amazon’s North American retail business, which runs on thinner margins, and its international retail business, which runs at a loss. The operating income for A.W.S. more than tripled in the quarter to $604 million.