• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, August 3, 2023

Amazon reported Thursday that second-quarter revenue rose 11% to $134.4 billion -- with artificial intelligence, cloud services and advertising playing a major role in the increase.

Along with AWS, advertising has become one of Amazon’s highest-margin businesses. Advertising contributed $10.6 billion in revenue in the quarter -- up 22% over a year ago, compared with a 23% growth rate in Q1 and 21% growth in the year-ago quarter.

Andy Jassy, Amazon CEO, stated in the release that the company continues to see strong demand for its advertising services as the team innovates for brands, including the ramp-up for "Thursday Night Football." Advertisers now have the ability to tailor TV spots by audience and create interactive experiences for consumers.

During the quarter, the company made many advancements in Amazon Web Services (AWS). Jassy explained how customers have begun to shift from cost optimization to new workload deployment, and the methods that AWS continues to take by adding generative artificial intelligence (GAI) services that make it much easier and more cost-effective for companies to train and run models with help from Trainium and Inferentia chips.

Customized Large Language Models help to build generative AI applications and agents on Bedrock, and write code much more efficiently with CodeWhisperer. 

Amazon’s cloud computing business rose 12%, contributing $22.1 billion to revenue, but fell from a growth rate of 33% a year earlier.

Services and products for third-party merchants have been expanding in recent years, with revenue from third-party seller services rising 18% to $32.3 billion.