LAS VEGAS — Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy downplayed the notion that the cloud platform is somehow losing steam because its growth rate, on a percentage basis, has been in recent decline. Amazon’s cloud business has experienced three consecutive quarters of declining cloud growth, but that doesn’t provide a full picture of AWS’ performance, Jassy said during a press conference at AWS re:Invent.

“We feel pretty good about the way we’re growing, and I think sometimes you can confuse yourself if you look at just the percentage of year-over-year growth because the percentage is only relative to your base,” he said. “We have a business that’s three times larger than the next largest provider.”

Moreover, Jassy noted that AWS’ revenue growth remains well above its public cloud competitors. “When you actually look at the details, we’re growing at a meaningfully larger absolute dollar rate than anybody else,” he said.

Amazon’s share of worldwide public cloud revenues has hovered around 40% for a few years, and although Microsoft is gaining market share it still brought in less than half of AWS’ total revenue during the most recently closed quarters, according to the latest data from Synergy Research Group. AWS banked $9 billion in revenue during its last quarter.

“We’re not really that focused on any one quarter, or any one year, or even any two years,” Jassy said. “We are trying to build a business that outlasts all of us, and we’re going to always make decisions that we think are best for our customers over a long period of time.”

AWS is currently operating at a $36 billion annual revenue run rate, and the business is growing 35% year over year, but Jassy sees nothing but upward opportunities for many years to come. “We’re in the early stages of the meat of enterprise [and] public sector adoption. It’s so early in this titanic shift,” he said.

Amazon is investing aggressively and disproportionately to prepare for future growth in the cloud market, according to Jassy. Much of that investment is earmarked for hiring talent, including salespeople, account managers, solutions architects, professional services, and support, he explained.

“AWS is just this incredible fast moving opportunity, so we’re going to invest as substantially as we possibly can,” he said. “We kind of famously say that we’re willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time and that’s kind of why.”

While Jassy claimed that he and his colleagues “don’t focus too much on market segment share,” he added that AWS is optimistic that it will continue to be the market segment leader.

“Our business — the output numbers, or revenue numbers, or margin numbers — they’ll be lumpy over time,” he said. “The way that enterprises and governments adopt the cloud is that they do a number of pilots, then they work through the enterprise agreements, and then they move certain workloads, and then there’s this kind of deluge where they move these large numbers of workloads…We can’t predict when that’s going to happen, it’s up to each of our customers.”