21.4% growth expected  24% delivered + added $44B new cloud backlog in a single quarter.

If you run cloud alliances, this is your 2026 major demand signal from the worlds biggest cloud.

Heres what the Q4 call just revealed:

Growth accelerated further on a massive base

AWS growth continued to accelerate to 24% the fastest weve seen in 13 quarters. Thats up $2.6 billion quarter over quarter and nearly $7 billion year over year.

AWS is now a $142 billion annualized run rate business.

Our backlog is $244 billion up 40% year over year up 22% quarter over quarter.

This isnt only AI  core migrations are back

Were seeing strong growth in core non-AI workloads as enterprises return to moving infrastructure from on premises to the cloud.

Finance was explicit: acceleration was driven by both core and AI services.

Partners were named as part of the edge

AWS highlighted its most vibrant partner ecosystem, then listed new agreements (OpenAI, Accenture, HSBC, CrowdStrike, Adobe, Salesforce, and more).

They also claimed more of the top 500 US startups use AWS than the next two providers combined.

Bedrock is scaling because buyers want choice

Most sophisticated AI applications leverage multiple models. Bedrock is now a multi-billion dollar annualized run rate business, with customer spend up 60% quarter over quarter.

And customers want AI where the rest of their applications and data are. AWS even pushed custom models earlier in the lifecycle (Nova Forge), calling it a potential game changer.

AI expands the rest of the footprint

As customers run large AI workloads on AWS, theyre adding to their core AWS footprint as well.

The next battleground is AI agents

Enterprises are apprehensive about deploying to production until agents can connect to data, tools, memory, identity, policy, governance But Bedrock Agent Core is now unlocking deployments.

Demand is ahead of supply (still)

We could actually grow faster if we had all the supply that we could take. AWS added 3.9GW of power in 12 months, 1.2GW just in Q4, and expects to double it again by the end of 27.

CFO: AWS added more data center capacity than any other company in the world.

AWS plans about $200B in capex, predominantly in AWS, while monetizing capacity as fast as we can install it.

Silicon + economics are becoming GTM levers

AWS says chips (Graviton + Trainium) are over $10B run rate. Trainium2 has over 1.4 million chips landed; Trainium3 supply is expected to be committed by mid 2026.

And the principle is simple: we have to make the costs of inference lower.

$244B is customer cloud commits

If $244B is the committed demand pool... are your AWS partner + marketplace GTM positioned to capture it?

PS. I covered the full Microsoft earnings breakdown in last weeks issue.

PPS. Thanks for reading! If this issue sparked an idea, please forward it to your alliance lead or cloud counterpart  its how this community shares what works.