Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) Web Services is the 800-pound gorilla of the cloud infrastructure market. The e-commerce giant's cloud business brought in more than $21 billion in revenue during the first quarter alone, and it claims a market share somewhere around one-third. For big enterprises, AWS is the de facto standard.

But AWS' size and enterprise focus has a downside. Economic uncertainty has forced those enterprises to take a good, hard look at their cloud computing bills. Something like 32% of all cloud computing spending is wasted, according to a survey by Flexera, and organizations generally have trouble keeping cloud spending under budget. Keeping a lid on cloud costs is now the order of the day.

The result of this shift in behavior has been a dramatic slowdown at AWS. Revenue grew by just 16% year over year in the first quarter, and it was essentially unchanged from the fourth quarter of 2022. Segment operating income plunged 21% from the prior-year period.

Continue reading

Source Fool.com