Amazon reported its second-quarter earnings today, and it was a bit of a whiff — and a bummer for Jeff Bezos, who is now no longer the solar system’s richest human and has been relegated to the unfortunate position of second-richest human.
The company’s earnings came in lighter than Wall Street expected. But Amazon’s cloud server farms, AWS, once again appear to be propping up Amazon’s profitability. The company’s huge bet on building up the basis of modern cloud computing could, in a way, be held partially responsible for Amazon’s long streak of profitability for the past many quarters.
Here’s a quick breakdown of that:
Amazon has turned AWS into a business that’s on track to generate well over $10 billion in revenue annually. It also has some of the best margins of…