PHOTO: REUTERSAMAZON beat expectations for quarterly cloud sales growth on Thursday (Jul 30) and boosted its annual capital spending outlook, signalling that demand for AI services remains strong enough to justify its massive infrastructure investments. “AWS is booming,” CEO Andy Jassy said in a statement, noting it was the unit’s fastest growth in 18 quarters. He said Amazon now expects capital expenditures to reach US$220 billion this year, a 10 per cent increase from an earlier forecast. Still, the strong showing from the world’s top cloud services provider mirrors solid performances from rivals Microsoft and Alphabet, both of which comfortably beat Wall Street estimates for cloud revenue. “ Advertising, another closely watched metric, showed continued strength as Amazon packs more of its properties with marketing messages.