Amazon share price rose about 6% in extended trading after Amazon.com said AWS revenue jumped 37% to $42.2 billion in the second quarter ended June 30. The stock had already gained about 4% during the session, giving investors a sharper after-hours move to digest.
Deborah Sophia reported from Bengaluru on July 30. The results arrived after Amazon.com topped market expectations for quarterly cloud revenue growth on Thursday, with AWS expanding faster than the 31.21% analysts had modeled.
37% AWS Growth Beats 31.21%
37% growth in AWS revenue put the cloud unit at $42.2 billion for the quarter, a pace that outstripped the 31.21% consensus estimate. That gap is the core reason the share price moved: the business that carries much of Amazon.com’s AI story kept growing faster than expected even as the quarter ended June 30.
$42.2 billion in AWS revenue also matters because Amazon said earlier this year that AWS' annual AI revenue run rate had surpassed $15 billion and was growing in a triple-digit percentage range. Earlier this year, Amazon said AWS had benefited from partnerships with OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Pinterest and Snowflake, adding a direct line between cloud demand and the company’s AI spending.
6% After-Hours Move
6% was the after-hours gain in Amazon share price, compared with about 4% during the regular session. That split shows how quickly the market adjusted once the cloud number landed, with the heaviest trading response coming after the quarterly update rather than before it.
4% in-session gains were followed by the extended-trading jump as investors focused on the one figure that mattered most for the quarter: AWS growth. Amazon.com also held its annual Prime Day event from June 23 through June 26, and Adobe Analytics estimated total spending during Prime Day at over $26.4 billion.
$7.6 Billion Cash Burn
$7.6 billion of cash burn on a trailing-twelve-months basis complicates the cloud win. Amazon.com said the figure stood against $18.2 billion of free cash flow a year earlier, so the same business that is growing fast is still funding heavy investment rather than turning every dollar of sales into cash.
How long Amazon can sustain this level of AWS growth as more data center capacity comes online is the question hanging over the stock now. If the company keeps turning AI demand into faster cloud sales while cash burn stays elevated, the next test will be whether that growth rate can hold without losing the margin of safety investors saw in Thursday’s numbers.
