Amazon, helped by growth in AI services and cloud revenue, posted first-quarter revenue and net profit that both beat market expectations, the Wall Street Journal reported on April 29.

Amazon's first-quarter revenue was $181.5 billion, up 17 percent from a year earlier. Net profit rose 77 percent to $30.3 billion. Amazon said pretax gains from its investment in Anthropic affected the rise in net profit. It forecast second-quarter revenue of $194 billion to $199 billion and operating profit of $20 billion to $24 billion.

The cloud business drove the first-quarter rise.

Amazon Web Services revenue rose 28 percent from a year earlier to $37.59 billion. Its share of Amazon's total revenue also grew to about 21 percent.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy (앤디 재시) said in a shareholder letter on April 9 that if first-quarter growth is maintained, annual revenue for AWS's AI business division would reach $15 billion this year.

Amazon plans to continue aggressive investment this year to expand its share of the AI market. Its investment plan for this year is $200 billion, up 60 percent from a year earlier. Jassy said demand for chatbots and AI tools is outpacing supplies of chips and storage.

Amazon said last week it would invest up to an additional $25 billion in Anthropic, and as part of that, Anthropic plans to use AWS services on a large scale.

Meta (메타) agreed under a separate contract to use Amazon's Graviton processors in next-generation AI products. Amazon also agreed to strengthen cooperation with OpenAI and provide OpenAI's latest models through AWS.

Amazon's online store business grew 12 percent in the first quarter from a year earlier. Amazon is also increasing investment in fast delivery, including spending $4 billion for two-day delivery in rural areas. Amazon entered the space business by acquiring satellite operator Globalstar for about $11 billion. Its low Earth orbit satellite internet service Leo is also scheduled to launch in mid-year.