Google has been spending heavily to win business away from Amazon Web Services, as evidenced by both companies' latest quarterly results, which were announced Tuesday.
The big picture: Google may be the leader in search, but when it comes to cloud services, it is still chasing after Amazon and Microsoft's Azure.
Between the lines: Google's revenue continues to grow, but so do its losses. Meanwhile, AWS continues to grow both the top and bottom line.
Consider this: It took 10 years for AWS to reach a $10 billion annual revenue run rate, a mark it reached in the first quarter of 2016.
- Less than two years later, in the fourth quarter of 2017, AWS hit a $20 billion run rate.
- It notched a $30 billion run rate just over a year after that, in Q1 2019, and then got to $40 billion by Q1 2020.
- Now, per last night's fourth-quarter earnings report, it's already at a $50 billion run rate. And AWS' Q4 revenue wasn't far from the $13 billion that Google Cloud took in for all of 2020.
Yes, but: AWS' latest quarter did come in slightly below analysts' expectations for both revenue and profits.
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