Amazon Web Services posts 45% year on year revenue growth in its fourth quarter contributing an impressive $5.11 billion in revenue to Amazon.

Newly released figures reveal that Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon’s cloud unit, has more than surpassed its expected revenue of $4.97 billion in Q4 2017. It has continued to be the fastest-growing and most profitable division of the company. Following its outstanding earnings report, Amazon’s stock jumped over 6%.

Over the past year Amazon, stock has increased more than 70%, hitting a $700 bn market cap for the first time and is now on the brink of eclipsing Microsoft in value. Across 2017, AWS was responsible for 10% of Amazon’s income, a total of $17.9 bn and in Q4 generated 8.5% of Amazon’s revenue. In 2017, it enjoyed $17.459 bn in sales, up 43% from $12.219 bn in sales in 2016.

AWS Success Down to Demand for Cloud Services

AWS CFO Brian Olsavsky credits this success to a combination of growing customer demand for cloud services and the near constant release of new products. During Amazon’s conference call with analysts, after the release of the figures, he said:

“Usage growth continues to be strong, growing at a higher rate than our revenue growth rate, and customers continued to add workloads and expand.”

“We’re a $20 bn run rate in top line revenues for AWS, up from $18 bn last quarter. So we’re very happy with both the progression in new services and features that we’ve been able to bring to customers and also their response with continued geographic expansion.”

Highlights from the Report

In Q4 AWS released 497 significant new services and features bringing the total number of launches in 2017 to 1,430. Across all of Amazon, Fire TV Stick and Echo Dot were the best-selling products in 2017 and its Alexa Skills store now offers more than 30,000 skills.

• Expedia, Ellucian, and DigitalGlobe have become enterprise customers
• New data centres for US intelligence agencies announced and a camera capable of AI computation revealed
• In two years more than 54,000 databases, including Oracle, have migrated onto AWS
• The Walt Disney Company and Turner named AWS their preferred public cloud provider
• Amazon GuardDuty, a fully managed intelligent threat detection service and Alexa for Business were launched
• AWS launched two new regions the first in France and a second in China
• Expedia, Intuit, the National Football League (NFL), Capital One, DigitalGlobe, and Cerner announced they’ve chosen AWS for machine learning and artificial intelligence
• Symantec will leverage AWS as its strategic infrastructure provider for the vast majority of its cloud workloads