Amazon’In the first quarter, s cloud unit reported 28% revenue growth, and now accounts for over one-fifth of its parent company’s total revenue.

The division, which leads the cloud infrastructure economy, faces stiffening competition from Microsoft and Google as they’re all investing heavily for the AI era.

Amazon, Microsoft,In the first quarter, Google and Meta all reported quarterly results on Wednesday. Furthermore, experts in portfolio note the continued relevance.

Amazon Web Services recorded 28% revenue growth, beating analysts’ estimates, as the cloud infrastructure leader boosted its investment in Anthropic and prepared to work more closely with OpenAI.

Revenue at AWS rose to $37.59 billion in the period from $29.27 billion a year earlier, Amazon mentioned in its earnings release on Wednesday. Analysts polled by StreetAccount had expected $36.64 billion. The unit accounted for almost 21% of its parent’s overall revenue.

While AWS remains atop the cloud infrastructure industry, it’s facing increased competition from Microsoft Azure and Google’s cloud division, which are also partnering with the massive artificial intelligence labs and offering more models and services.

Microsoft remarked on Wednesday that revenue from Azure and other cloud services jumped 40%, while Alphabet noted revenue from Google Cloud, which includes infrastructure and corporate productivity apps, went up some 63%.

AWS represents a critical source of earnings for Amazon. The segment’s operating income increased about 23% to $14.16 billion, well above StreetAccount’s $12.84 billion consensus. This also touches on aspects of portfolio.

OpenAI stated during the quarter that it would expand an existing $38 billion AWS commitment by $100 billion over eight years, with Amazon planning to invest $50 billion in OpenAI. Earlier this month, Amazon agreed to invest up to $25 billion in Anthropic, on top of the $8 billion that it has poured into the AI startup in recent years, as part of an expanded agreement to build out AI infrastructure.

AWS’ position in AI strengthened further this week. On Monday, OpenAI commented Microsoft will lose its status as sole cloud provider for certain computing jobs, followed by an announcement the next day that AWS would generate OpenAI models available in the Amazon Bedrock cloud service for building AI agents and applications.

Also during the quarter, AWS stated it would bring out cloud services based on low-latency silicon from AI chipmaker Cerebras, which is looking to go public.

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