Google Cloud revenue doubled in a year; Azure grew 48%, AWS 39%

01Five quarters: all three faster, Google fastest

AWS grew 20.2% in the September quarter of 2025, then 23.6%, 28.4%, 36.8% and 39.3%. Amazon calls the latest its fastest growth in nearly five years and puts AWS at a US$184bn annual run rate.⁴⁵⁶⁷⁸ Google Cloud went from 33.5% to 47.8%, 63.4%, 81.8% and 102.6%.^10111213 Azure, on Microsoft’s restated basis, grew 39.7%, 39.2%, 40.3%, 42.0% and then 48.2%.²¹

Azure’s 48% was above the 44–45% in constant currency that Microsoft had guided for the quarter.² Amy Hood, its finance chief, said Azure revenue “was ahead of expectations and increased 48%, even with the 3P capacity delays”, meaning third-party data-centre capacity that arrived late.³ The shares read the quarter differently: on the session after each company’s results, Microsoft closed 0.16% lower, Amazon 1.41% lower and Alphabet 12.64% lower.¹⁶ Why the market sold companies that beat is the subject of our piece on the reporting week; Alphabet’s fall is in the Note on its Search share.

02What is inside each number

Azure has a new definition. Until June, Microsoft gave only a growth rate for “Azure and other cloud services”. On 2 September it moved to two segments and began to publish Azure revenue in dollars, restated back to July 2024. The new Azure leaves out GitHub cloud and developer services and Security Copilot, now in Microsoft 365 commercial cloud, and Healthcare and Life Sciences cloud, now in Industry solutions. Satya Nadella wrote that Azure “becomes more purely our consumption-based platform and infrastructure business”.² The change is small in the rate: for the June quarter, 43% on the old basis and 42% on the new. Azure’s fiscal year to June came to US$101.9bn.²

Google Cloud includes an acquisition and hardware. Alphabet closed its US$29.5bn purchase of Wiz, the cloud-security company, on 11 March, and its results are in the Google Cloud segment from that date; a year earlier they were not.¹⁴ Thomas Kurian, Google Cloud’s chief executive, said sales of TPU systems, Google’s AI chips sold with the servers, networking and software around them, “were also a meaningful contributor”. Anat Ashkenazi, the finance chief, said growth excluding TPU systems “was again incredibly strong”, and gave no number.¹⁵ The 10-Q puts the growth down to Google Cloud Platform, “largely from infrastructure and platform services, and TPU system sales”.¹⁴

AWS is the plain segment. Its growth excluding currency moves was also 39%, and its definition is the same in all five releases we read.⁴

03The backlog, and what it means for a buyer

Contracts signed and not yet delivered. Amazon’s performance obligations, “primarily related to AWS”, were US$364bn at 31 March, US$496bn at 30 June and US$578bn at 30 September, with a weighted-average remaining life of 6.1 years.⁹ Google Cloud’s backlog was US$155bn a year ago, over US$460bn at the end of March and US$561bn now; Alphabet expects just over 55% of it to become revenue within 24 months.¹⁰¹²¹⁵ Microsoft does not split Azure out: its commercial remaining performance obligation, across all its business software and cloud, rose 73% to US$677bn, with a weighted average duration of 2.3 years and “a large Azure commitment this quarter”.¹³

Who signs them. Amazon named new AWS agreements with Meta, NVIDIA, OpenAI, Salesforce and Oracle among others.⁴ Kurian named Anthropic and Apple among TPU customers.¹⁵ And capacity is short. Hood: “Customer demand continues to exceed available supply.”³ Alphabet began renting third-party compute at the end of the quarter “given the supply-constraint environment”.¹⁵