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. 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.
The company has been building data centers and making other infrastructure investments to keep up in the race to turn A.I. advances into real businesses. Microsoft has been closing Amazon’s lead in cloud computing, in part from customers wanting access to advanced A.I. systems from its partner, the start-up OpenAI.
