Big cloud companies all delivered results that beat expectations in first-quarter earnings tallies. Their aggressive investment strategy in AI appears to be continuing to feed into growth in cloud businesses.

Amazon Web Services (AWS), the world's largest cloud company, posted first-quarter revenue of $37.59 billion, up 28 percent from a year earlier. It also beat analysts' expectations, showing the fastest growth in about 3 years. In the fourth quarter of last year, AWS revenue grew 24 percent from a year earlier.

AWS' share of Amazon's total revenue also rose to around 21 percent. AWS operating profit in the first quarter rose 23 percent to $14.16 billion.

Microsoft also said revenue from Azure and cloud services rose 40 percent over the same period. That beat analysts' expectations. In the previous quarter, Microsoft Azure revenue growth was 39 percent.

Alphabet's Google Cloud also showed strong growth. Google Cloud, led by cloud infrastructure and the productivity platform Google Workspace, posted first-quarter revenue of $20 billion, up 63 percent from a year earlier. In the fourth quarter, Google Cloud revenue rose 47 percent from a year earlier.

Big cloud companies have expanded investment in AI infrastructure and plan to remain in aggressive mode this year.

Amazon expects 2026 capital expenditure, or capex, to reach $200 billion. That is sharply higher than $138.1 billion last year.

Alphabet also raised its 2026 capital expenditure outlook to $180 billion to $190 billion from $175 billion to $185 billion. Alphabet previously said in December that it would also acquire data centre company Intersect. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said on a conference call after the earnings release, "For the time being, we are short of computing resources. If we could have met demand, cloud revenue would have been higher."

Microsoft's capital expenditure in the past quarter fell to $31.9 billion from $37.5 billion in the previous quarter. The company said, "The decline was expected and is due to the timing of data centre construction and hardware deliveries, not a slowdown in demand for cloud and AI services."