Amazon’s cloud business generated nearly as much profit during the third quarter of 2021 as Google Cloud reported in total revenue. This signifies the enduring gap between the world’s largest and third-largest public cloud. 

The rate of growth in Amazon Web Services (AWS) continues to climb, hitting a year-over-year increase of 39% during Q3. AWS generated $16.1 billion in revenue, and its operating income increased 38% to $4.88 billion during the quarter.

Microsoft Azure revenue climbed 50% year over year during the quarter, and Google Cloud revenue jumped 45% to $4.99 billion. Microsoft doesn’t disclose its public cloud revenue in dollars. 

AWS’ growth, albeit lower on a percentage basis than its largest competitors, has steadily increased through 2021, following a period of stabilization around 28% to 29% in late 2019 and leading into the COVID-19 crisis. AWS revenue jumped 32% in Q1 and 37% in Q2.

AWS has seen a real acceleration of revenue growth as customers have expanded their commitment to the cloud and selected AWS as a cloud partner,” CFO Brian Olsavsky said during the earnings call. 

That growth was driven by a large base of customers and services, including machine learning and industry-specific offerings such as health care data management and analysis, according to Olsavsky. He also noted “strong interest in rapid adoption of our custom silicon in AWS designed Graviton2 processors.

Overall, AWS contributed 14.5% of Amazon’s total revenue of $110.8 billion, and cloud profit offset what would have otherwise been a total profit loss for Amazon during the quarter. Amazon’s net income declined 49% year over year to $3.2 billion.

“We’ve always said that when confronted with the choice between optimizing for short-term profits versus what’s best for customers over the long term, we will choose the latter — and you can see that during every phase of this pandemic,” CEO Andy Jassy said in a statement. 

“We worked closely with businesses and governments to leverage AWS to maintain business continuity as they responded to the pandemic. Customers have appreciated this commitment, which is part of what’s driving this past quarter’s AWS growth acceleration to 39% year over year; but, it’s also driven extraordinary investments across our businesses to satisfy customer needs,” he added.

Jassy took over Amazon as CEO this summer following the departure of founder Jeff Bezos, who is now executive chair, and hired Adam Selipsky to return to the company as AWS CEO. Jassy wasn’t on the earnings call.

On the telecom front, Amazon was relatively quiet during the quarter but it did last month earn an expanded partnership with NEC to develop a global 5G offering with AWS spanning a cloud native and open 5G mobile core, operations and business support systems, and local 5G use cases. 

Verizon this week announced plans to pair its terrestrial mobile network with Amazon’s not-yet-launched low Earth orbit satellite network to augment the coverage of its 5G network in the U.S. and provide backhaul to remote areas that were previously unreachable. Further down the line, Verizon hopes to use Amazon’s Project Kuiper technology to provide coverage and new services to global enterprises in rural and remote locations.