Brief - The Hustle

Amazon Web Services vs. Google Cloud

Written by Trung T. Phan | Feb 5, 2021 9:43:40 AM

AWS’s **profit** is more than Google’s **revenue**. (Source: Axios)

Slightly lost in the shuffle of the “Jeff Bezos is stepping down” news is the latest update on the Cloud Wars.

Per Axios, Amazon Web Services (AWS) pulled in revenue of $43.4B in 2020 and a profit of $13.5B. In comparison, Google Cloud’s revenue is $13.1B with a loss of $5.6B.

A few things to note about these numbers:

  • Growth: Google Cloud’s full-year revenue is growing faster (+46% YoY) vs. AWS (+30% YoY).
  • Profitability: Google Cloud is still posting huge losses as it ramps up its enterprise cloud presence. What’s worth noting, though, is that at the same corporate age as Google Cloud is now — 9 years in — AWS posted a profit of $1.8B on revenue of $7.9B, per The Information. (Bezos has always been about cost discipline).
  • Market share: AWS has plateaued at ~33% for the past few years, while Microsoft has doubled its share (10-20%) since 2017. And with 9%, Google is currently in 3rd place. Meanwhile, IBM is… let’s not talk about it.