Amazon's cloud is an unstoppable train that could do $12 billion in revenue this year

As other cloud companies talk about their race to hit $10 billion in revenue - Salesforce expects to do it next year - Amazon is now on track to hit over $11 billion, possibly $12 billion, this year, if its current quarter is as good as the one it just reported.

AWS had revenue of over $3.2 billion in the last quarter, generating operating income of $861 million.

So far this year, AWS had revenue of nearly $8.7 billion and operating income of nearly $2.2 billion.

So if next quarter hits $3.2+ billion in sales, the company will finish the year with close to $12 billion in revenue.

There's reason to believe it will. This quarter was an increase from the previous quarter's nearly $2.9 billion in revenue. It was also 55% more than the year-ago quarter.

Amazon's cloud computing business is already so vast and growing so fast that in the past quarter alone, it pushed off the cliff not just one competitor but two.

In August, Rackspace took itself private, after years of failing to compete head-on and then becoming a cloud partner for Amazon's arch-rival Microsoft, and finally, partnering with the unstoppable Amazon Web Services itself.

More importantly, earlier this month, one of Amazon's fiercest rivals, VMware, threw in the towel and announced a partnership in which VMware will sell Amazon's cloud and VMware's customers will be able to more easily use it.

VMware had for years tried to build its own competitive cloud and a network of cloud providers, and at one time a VMware executive said, "I find it really hard to believe that we cannot collectively beat a company that sells books."

During the press conference announcing the partnership, a jubilant AWS CEO Andy Jassy stood next to a at-times deflated-looking VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger.

As one VMware employee told Business Insider, "It's pretty hard to look into the eyes of your enemy and admit defeat."

In the early days, Amazon the bookseller did have trouble selling to enterprises, with their needs for reliability, security, and so on. But today, with a network of enterprise companies like Rackspace and VMware out selling Amazon's cloud, it's getting harder for others to compete.

Disclosure: Jeff Bezos is an investor in Business Insider through hispersonal investment company Bezos Expeditions.