Google Cloud Grows But AWS Shines Again

Google’s parent company Alphabet posted strong second quarter results on Thursday, with Google’s cloud division helping drive revenues past Wall Street expectations.

Google increased its total revenue by 21 percent over the last twelve months, hitting $20.5 billion (£15.6bn). While a large chunk of that growth came from Google’s bread and butter – search advertising – growth in cloud computing helped Google’s ‘Other Revenues’ pull in $2.2 billion (£1.7bn) this last quarter, a 33 percent hike over the same period last year.

Google’s ‘Other Revenues’ also count Google Play and Google Apps, so it’s difficult to ascertain exactly how well Google Cloud Platform is performing.

Ruth Porat, the chief financial officer of Alphabet, said that the company’s second quarter results were “terrific”.

“We continue to invest responsibly in support of our many compelling opportunities,” she said. Those investments include mobile and video.

But Google’s ‘Other Bets’ segment, which includes technologies like Nest and Verily, continued to suck in money.

‘Other Bets’ suffered losses of $859 million (£652m), on revenue of $185 million (£140m). While that revenue was up from $74 million (£56m) the same time last year, losses also grew, up from $660 million (£500m) year over year.

And now to the carrot on the stick; the target that both Google and Microsoft are both chasing in cloud.

AWS

Amazon also reported its financials on Thursday, and proved yet again that Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon’s cloud division, is the undeniable leader in public cloud. Amazon Web Services revenue grew 58 percent, compared to a 31 percent hike in Amazon overall.

AWS revenue for the quarter hit $2.89 billion (£2.2bn), up from $1.82 billion (£1.4bn) for the same quarter last year. This puts the division on track for the much-celebrated $10 billion annual run rate.

As is clear to see, Amazon Web Services made more money than Google’s Cloud Platform, Apps and Play did put together.

“It’s been a busy few months for Amazon around the world, and particularly in India — where we launched a new AWS Region,” said Amazon boss Jeff Bezos, who is now the third richest man in the world.

Big wins for AWS in the past few months include signing up Salesforce as a customer, as well as rapid Indian expansion of AWS. Amazon cloud’s UK region is still on track to launch early next year.

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