Charted: How Google Cloud stacks up to AWS
- Ina Fried, author of Axios Login
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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