Amazon beat Wall Street expectations in its latest quarterly earnings report, with its advertising business surging by 18 percent year over year to $17.3 billion.

Overall Amazon net sales was $187.8 billion in the quarter, with net income of $20 billion.

The growth was driven by a strong holiday quarter for retail, AI products at AWS, and string performance at Prime Video, where Thursday Night Football averaged 13.7 million viewers.

The holiday shopping season was the most successful yet for Amazon and we appreciate the support of our customers, selling partners, and employees who helped make it so, said Andy Jassy, president and CEO of Amazon, in a statement. When we look back on this quarter several years from now, I suspect what well most remember is the remarkable innovation delivered across all of our businesses, none more so than in AWS where we introduced our new Trainium2 AI chip, our own foundation models in Amazon Nova, a plethora of new models and features in Amazon Bedrock that give customers flexibility and cost savings, liberating transformations in Amazon Q to migrate from old platforms, and the next edition of Amazon SageMaker to pull data, analytics, and AI together more concertedly. These benefits are often realized by customers (and the business) several months down the road, but these are substantial enablers in this emerging technology environment and were excited to see what customers build.

More to come.