Amazon Web Services is now a $17.5 billion business

Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing division of Amazon, saw major gains in fourth quarter 2017 earnings Thursday as the tech giant titans its lead in the cloud wars.

In fact, Amazon Web Services accounted for 73% of the net income Amazon as a whole posted in the holiday quarter.

• AWS had $5.1 billion in sales for the fourth quarter of 2017, up 17% from $3.5 billion in the same quarter of 2016.
• AWS had $17.459 billion in sales in 2017, up 43% from $12.219 billion in sales in 2016.
• Operating income for AWS was up 39% from $3.1 billion in 2016 to $4.3 billion in 2017.
• More than 54,000 databases from vendors including Oracle have migrated onto AWS since the company started offering migration services in 2016.

Across the company, Amazon reported $60.5 billion in revenues in the fourth quarter, beating analyst expectations of $59.85 billion.

Click here to read more about Amazon's fourth quarter 2017 earnings.

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