Amazon Web Services

AWS revenue rose 20% year over year to $33 billion in Q3 2025 as coverage shifted toward AI-compute economics, EU scrutiny and operational resilience.

Who they are

Amazon Web Services is Amazon’s cloud-computing arm, appearing in coverage as a major provider of infrastructure and AI capacity. Its stories connect it to Amazon and CEO Andy Jassy, enterprise cloud rivals Microsoft and Azure, AI-chip suppliers and alternatives including Nvidia and Trainium, and customers or partners such as Anthropic and Twelve Labs.

The recent arc

Coverage peaked in 2025Q4, driven by the October US-EAST-1 outage and Amazon’s Q3 results, which reported AWS revenue up 20% year over year to $33 billion and operating income up 9.5% to $11.4 billion. The outage put AWS’s centrality to dependent online services back at the forefront, while the results underscored the scale of its cloud business amid AI demand.

The 2026Q2 cycle moved toward the economics and governance of AI infrastructure: AWS raised Nvidia GPU prices by 20% for EC2 Capacity Blocks while leaving Trainium pricing unchanged, and EU preliminary findings identified Azure and AWS as the EU’s largest and second-largest cloud services for possible tougher Digital Markets Act oversight. The most recent stories add a product-retirement signal, with Mechanical Turk closed to new customers and placed into maintenance, and a leadership change as Compute, AI and Platform SVP Dave Brown prepares to leave after 19 years.

The tension

The coverage centers on AWS’s contest with Microsoft Azure for cloud and AI-infrastructure leadership, now sharpened by EU attention to both firms’ market position. At the same time, AWS’s GPU price increase alongside unchanged Trainium pricing highlights a practical tension between dependence on Nvidia-backed capacity and the push to make Amazon’s own AI chips a viable alternative; Anthropic’s AWS training relationship makes that infrastructure contest especially consequential.

Why it matters

If this trajectory holds, AWS will be judged not only on growth but on whether it can supply dependable, competitively priced AI capacity while meeting closer regulatory scrutiny. Azure’s position ahead of AWS in the EU and the prospect of DMA oversight could make the competitive rules more consequential, while outages, regional operating risks, and senior leadership turnover show that cloud scale also brings execution exposure.

Related: Amazon · Microsoft · Azure · AI · Andy Jassy · AWS says services have “returned to normal operations” after a US-EAST