AWS experienced its slowest year-on-year growth since it started reporting separate results from its parent company, while Alphabet's earnings and revenue beat expectations.
Amazon's cloud computing unit still drove most of the most of the company's second-quarter profits, and the division is still easily the largest cloud provider by revenue.
Cloudy with a chance of antitrust probes
Amazon managed to increase revenue by 20 percent from last year to $63.4 billion, but AWS 'only' delivered $8.4 billion in sales, slowing year-on-year growth to 37 percent - down from 40 percent in previous quarters. AWS also saw a 29 percent increase in operating income, amounting to $2.1 billion.
The results bring an end to Amazon’s streak of four consecutive quarters of record profits. The company reported $2.6 billion in profit for the three months ending in June, below the $3.6 billion the company took from January to March.
This profit comes as employees, customers and activists protested the company’s labor and privacy practices on its annual Prime Day earlier this month. These actions appear to have had little effect on sales that day; the company said that Prime Day sales “surpassed the previous Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined.”
Google’s parent company Alphabet reported revenue of $38.9 billion, up 19 percent year-over-year, as well as $9.2 billion in profits. This time last year, Alphabet made a profit of $3.2 billion, though this was affected by a $5 billion charge from an antitrust fine by European regulators.
The advertising behemoth also reported losses on $989 million from its 'other bets' division, which includes investments like autonomous vehicle company Waymo. The self-driving car service is currently only only available in limited trials in cities in Arizona.
Google continues to divide its financial disclosures into advertising, other revenues and other bets, as well as not disclosing individual results for products, such as YouTube or Google Cloud.
"Q2 was another strong quarter for Google Cloud, which reached an annual revenue run rate [quarterly revenue extrapolated over a whole year] of over $8 billion and continues to grow at a significant pace," Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in an investor call. It is unclear whether that figure includes revenue from G Suite applications, as well as standard cloud services.
Both companies have been targeted in Congress’ broad antitrust review into the reach and power of major tech companies. Apple and Facebook will also fall under this review that focuses on growing accusations that tech giants are unlawfully stifling competition.
According to The Wall Street Journal, the DoJ has also launched a specific antitrust investigation into Google.
