Amazon's profits grow more than 800%, lifted by cloud services

Seattle

FOR most of its life, Amazon sacrificed profits if it could build another few warehouses to ship orders to customers more quickly or find some other investment to fuel its growth.

Now, it cannot avoid showing big profits thanks to the lucrative cloud computing business in which it has improbably become a leader.

On Thursday, Amazon reported net income of US$857 million in its most recent quar…