At the heart of its performance is the cloud segment, which is capitalizing on investors' appetite for remote computing services and artificial intelligence (AI).

"The determination of companies to modernize their [IT] infrastructures and to attract AWS [Amazon Web Services] AI services has reaccelerated the growth rate" of the cloud subsidiary, said Andy Jassy, Amazon's CEO, quoted in the earnings release.

He added that the sales platform had also contributed to the group's performance during the first three months of the year, thanks, in his view, to "low prices" and "delivery speeds".

Amazon's core business, e-commerce, "found its form again at the end of 2023", noted Blake Droesch of Emarketer.

"The company continues to reap the benefits of its strategy of regionalizing order fulfillment centers, with ever faster deliveries, which delights customers".

For the analyst, "this allows it to remain competitive in the face of new threats posed by Temu and Shein", the Chinese low-price platforms.

The Seattle-based group has just announced that its delivery speeds have increased at the beginning of the year.

"In March, about 60% of orders received via Prime [Amazon's paid subscription service] arrived the same day or the next day in the 60 largest cities in the US", Amazon said in its press release today.

But investors have welcomed above all the growth of the cloud, which represents the bulk of the conglomerate's profits, and which the new wave of AI is set to change.

In the first quarter, AWS, Amazon's remote computing arm, made a profit of $25 billion, up 17%, of which $9.4 billion was operating income, a key indicator of profitability.

The acceleration of AWS's growth pleased Wall Street, which had not expected so much. Amazon shares rose by more than two percent after the close of trading.

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