Amazon reported its highest first-quarter profit on Tuesday as it continued to wring efficiencies out of its retail business and recharge growth in its cloud computing operations.
The company was also for the first time on track to have $100 billion in annual cloud computing sales.
The company had $143.3 billion in revenue in the first three months of the year, up 13 percent from a year earlier. Profit more than tripled, to $10.4 billion. The results beat analysts’ expectations.
“It was a good start to the year across the business, and you can see that in both our customer experience improvements and financial results,” Andy Jassy, Amazon’s chief executive, said in a statement.
After a year of companies paring back tech spending, Amazon’s lucrative cloud computing business has been regaining steam. Sales from cloud computing were up 17 percent, to $25 billion. The growth was the fastest pace in more than a year. Operating income for that business grew 84 percent to $9.4 billion, accounting for most of the company’s operating profit.
Amazon’s share price was up more than 3 percent in after-hours trading on Tuesday.
Amazon spent about $14 billion on capital expenses and leases in the quarter, a figure particularly driven by investments in cloud computing, Brian Olsavsky, Amazon’s finance chief, said on a call with investors. That amount was about $1 billion more than for the same period last year. He said Amazon expected to spend more as the year goes on, “primarily to serve the generative A.I. opportunities that we are seeing.”
