Amazon’s cloud (AWS) made $500 million from sales in the first quarter 2012. The cloud service has grown significantly year-on-year with 2012’s first quarter up by $189 million from the same time last year.

The Amazon cloud has proven to be the fastest rising area of business in the company, with growth accounting for 61 percent compared to areas such as media at 19 percent and electronic business at 43 percent.

Werner Vogels, chief technology officer at Amazon, said: “Hundreds of thousands of businesses are using AWS today. The US federal government has a cloud first strategy and over 100 US agencies are using AWS.”