Sources: Apple spent $350M in 2018 and is now spending $30M+ every month on Amazon's cloud, making it one of the biggest AWS customers
As Apple and Amazon compete for a greater share of consumer dollars and attention, they also have a particularly intimate business relationship …
Context & Ripple Effects
Apple's AWS bill sits inside a decade-long attempt to stop paying its biggest platform rival. The company signed a $400M-$600M Google Cloud deal back in 2016 explicitly to reduce reliance on AWS, and later reported cutting AWS spend to roughly $370M in 2018 from $775M in 2017 in pursuit of self-sufficiency.
Yet CNBC's reporting that Apple was spending $30M+ every month makes it one of AWS's largest customers at the exact moment AWS posted $7.7B in quarterly revenue and about half of Amazon's operating income. The relationship matters because the two companies compete directly for consumer dollars and attention while one funds the other's profit engine.
First-order effects
- Apple keeps writing large monthly checks to Amazon even as the two fight over services and devices — money that flows straight into the AWS segment generating roughly half of Amazon's operating income.
- Apple's own data-center buildout has narrowed but not closed the gap: even after the reported 2018 cuts, residual AWS spend runs at a scale few other customers match.
Second-order effects
- Diversification, not exit, is the working strategy — Apple shifted storage growth toward Google Cloud, where it became a larger customer than ByteDance or Spotify by 2021, splitting its dependency across two rivals instead of eliminating it.
- Other large software buyers like Salesforce, which committed $400M to AWS over four years, face the same calculus: hyperscale capacity is cheapest to rent precisely from the competitor you least want to fund.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, vertical integration caps out below full independence: by 2024 Apple was reportedly exploring renting out its own chips while spending around $7B a year renting Nvidia silicon via AWS and Google — the dependency deepening, not dissolving, as workloads shift to AI.
- Structurally, the biggest consumer-tech companies become anchor tenants of the very cloud rivals they compete with, giving AWS and Google Cloud a revenue base that is unusually sticky because replacing it means rebuilding hyperscale infrastructure in-house.
The trend: Even the most vertically integrated consumer-tech companies are converging on permanent multi-cloud dependence on their direct competitors, with AI workloads now expanding rather than shrinking the bill.