Technology

The Impressive Stats Behind Amazon’s Dominance of the Cloud

Published

4 years ago

July 8, 2019

Jeff Desjardins

To the average person, cloud computing must seem quite magical.

All at once, the cloud provides instant access to all of your data, photos, music, and applications, without you having to store any of that data locally. In fact, users can access the cloud from practically anywhere in the world, and across multiple devices and platforms.

Yet, this all happens without you actually seeing any visible infrastructure. With data now being created at record speeds, where the heck is all this information being physically stored?

The Rise of AWS

Even though you can’t see the vast infrastructure that runs the cloud, it does exist somewhere.

As today’s infographic from RapidValue shows, much of this infrastructure is owned and operated by Amazon, through its extremely profitable subsidiary of Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Here are the key stats on this dominant service that powers much of the internet today:

The Impressive Stats Behind Amazon's Dominance of the Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS) quietly launched in 2002, and in a short time has been able to scale into the largest single player in cloud computing (IaaS, PaaS).

While it is a well-known name to software developers, AWS emerged on a more mainstream basis once its financials were separated from those of parent Amazon.com.

Even in 2018, AWS delivered most of Amazon’s operating income.

AWS By the Numbers

To understand the true scale of AWS, you need to look at the numbers.

AWS has over 1 million active users in 190 countries
AWS has 5x more deployed cloud infrastructure as their next 14 competitors combined
Each day, AWS adds as much infrastructure as they used to run in total 7 years back
Amazon S3 is designed to deliver 99.999999999% durability and scale past trillions of objects worldwide
AWS partner, Netflix, accounts for up to one-third of Internet traffic during peak usage times
AWS accounts for 41.5% of the public cloud market, bigger than Microsoft, Google, Rackspace, and IBM combined

Through incredible economies of scale, AWS has decreased its prices at least as many as 60 times since its launch – and despite this, AWS generated a whopping $26 billion in revenue for parent Amazon in 2018.

Markets

Charted: What are Retail Investors Interested in Buying in 2023?

What key themes and strategies are retail investors looking at for the rest of 2023? Preview: AI is a popular choice.

Published

6 days ago

September 25, 2023

Pallavi Rao

A cropped bar chart showing the various options retail investors picked as part of their strategy for the second half of 2023.

Charted: Retail Investors’ Top Picks for 2023

U.S. retail investors, enticed by a brief pause in the interest rate cycle, came roaring back in the early summer. But what are their investment priorities for the second half of 2023?

We visualized the data from Public’s 2023 Retail Investor Report, which surveyed 1,005 retail investors on their platform, asking “which investment strategy or themes are you interested in as part of your overall investment strategy?”

Survey respondents ticked all the options that applied to them, thus their response percentages do not sum to 100%.

Where Are Retail Investors Putting Their Money?

By far the most popular strategy for retail investors is dividend investing with 50% of the respondents selecting it as something they’re interested in.

Dividends can help supplement incomes and come with tax benefits (especially for lower income investors or if the dividend is paid out into a tax-deferred account), and can be a popular choice during more inflationary times.

Investment Strategy	Percent of Respondents
Dividend Investing	50%
Artificial Intelligence	36%
Total Stock Market Index	36%
Renewable Energy	33%
Big Tech	31%
Treasuries (T-Bills)	31%
Electric Vehicles	27%
Large Cap	26%
Small Cap	24%
Emerging Markets	23%
Real Estate	23%
Gold & Precious Metals	23%
Mid Cap	19%
Inflation Protection	13%
Commodities	12%

Meanwhile, the hype around AI hasn’t faded, with 36% of the respondents saying they’d be interested in investing in the theme—including juggernaut chipmaker Nvidia. This is tied for second place with Total Stock Market Index investing.

Treasury Bills (30%) represent the safety anchoring of the portfolio but the ongoing climate crisis is also on investors’ minds with Renewable Energy (33%) and EVs (27%) scoring fairly high on the interest list.

Commodities and Inflation-Protection stocks on the other hand have fallen out of favor.

Come on Barbie, Let’s Go Party…

Another interesting takeaway pulled from the survey is how conversations about prevailing companies—or the buzz around them—are influencing trades. The platform found that public investors in Mattel increased 6.6 times after the success of the ‘Barbie’ movie.

Bud Light also saw a 1.5x increase in retail investors, despite receiving negative attention from their fans after the company did a beer promotion campaign with trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney.

Given the origin story of a large chunk of American retail investors revolves around GameStop and AMC, these insights aren’t new, but they do reveal a persisting trend.