Amazon Web Services sales in the second quarter were up 12% from a year ago to $22.1 billion with operating income of $5.4 billion.

Overall, Amazon reported second quarter net income of $6.7 billion, or 65 cents a share, on revenue of $134.4 billion. The earnings include a $200 million gain from the valuation of Rivian.

Wall Street was expecting Amazon to report second quarter non-GAAP earnings of 35 cents a share on revenue of $131.5 billion. AWS revenue was expected to be about $21.8 billion.

Leading up to Amazon's report, analysts were focused on AWS growth and cost cutting. Google Cloud grew at a 28% clip in the second quarter and Microsoft Azure grew 26% in its latest quarter from smaller bases. Microsoft doesn't break out Azure revenue. 

By segment:

  • North American e-commerce sales were up 11% in the second quarter to $82.5 billion with operating income of $3.2 billion.

  • International e-commerce sales were $29.7 billion, up 10% from a year ago, with an operating loss of $900 million.

  • AWS had operating income of $5.4 billion on revenue of $22.1 billion.

In a statement, CEO Andy Jassy said the company has continued to lower its cost on the retail side and said the following about AI:

"Our AWS growth stabilized as customers started shifting from cost optimization to new workload deployment, and AWS has continued to add to its meaningful leadership position in the cloud with a slew of generative AI releases that make it much easier and more cost-effective for companies to train and run models (Trainium and Inferentia chips), customize Large Language Models to build generative AI applications and agents (Bedrock), and write code much more efficiently with CodeWhisperer."

As for the outlook, Amazon projected third quarter sales between $138 billion and $143 billion, or up 9% to 13% from a year ago. Operating income is expected to be between $5.5 billion and $8.5 billion.