Amazon's AWS Vs. Microsoft Azure Vs. Google Cloud: How The Cloud Race Shaped Up In Q3

Big tech earnings mostly surprised to the downside, prompting market analysts to comment that the market leadership is moving away from techs. Although Alphabet, Inc.’s (NASDAQ:GOOGL) (NASDAQ:GOOG) core search business and YouTube experienced weakness, its Cloud business was touted as a bright spot.

Here’s a look at how the lucrative Cloud business of each of the three major U.S. vendors fared in the third quarter:

AWS: Amazon, Inc.'s (NASDAQ:AMZN) Cloud business, christened as Amazon Web Service or AWS, raked in sales of $20.54 billion in the quarter. This represented a 27.4% year-over-year increase and a 4.1% quarter-over-quarter increase.

The segment contributed $5.4 billion of Amazon’s operating income, helping to offset the operating losses collected by the company’s core eCommerce business.

AWS accounted for 16.2% of Amazon’s total revenue.

"Our teams across AWS continue to work relentlessly to expand that breadth and depth, including recent launches of new EC2 machine learning training instances in AWS IoT fleet-wise,” CFO Brian Olsavsky said on the third-quarter earnings call.

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Google Cloud: Alphabet’s Google Cloud fetched the company $6.87 billion in revenue, up 37.6% year-over-year and 9.4% sequentially. The division, however, generated an operating loss of $699 million.

Alphabet derives just about 10% of its revenue from the Cloud business.

CEO Sundar Pichai said on the earnings call that Cloud is a key priority for the company, adding that long-term trends that are driving cloud adoption continue to play an even stronger role during uncertain times.

Microsoft Azure: Software giant Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ:MSFT) said its Cloud revenue rose 24% year-over-year to $25.7 billion. In constant currency, the growth was a steeper 31%.

Revenue from its Intelligent Cloud business was up 20% to $20.3 billion, driven by 35% revenue growth at Azure and other cloud services. Azure is Microsoft’s public cloud computing platform.