Amazon (AMZN – Analyst Report) started breaking out AWS as a separate segment in the first quarter and in just a few months, it's clear just how important this business is.

Going into the quarter, the segment was running at a $6 billion revenue run-rate, but from where we are standing today, it looks like it could generate a billion more than that.

Management said that AWS operates in 11 regions right now, of which the EU (Frankfurt) region, which opened in Oct 2014 remains the fastest-growing international region to date. India (to launch in 2016) will be the 12th region, which Amazon says will enable customers to run workloads in India with Indian users seeing improved latency.

Management was also positive about usage rates, which they said were much higher than the revenue growth rate. While there remain some unfavourable pricing comps here that should alleviate in the second half, it's probable (and likely) that management's aggressive pricing policy will continue. This isn't a bad thing when taking market share, but could be an undue pressure on profits. So let's see what the numbers say:

2Q Numbers

Revenue of $1.82 billion grew 16.5% sequentially and 81.5% year over year. The revenue runrate is in the neighborhood of $6.78 billion, so unless there is a major pressure in the back half, Amazon's initial projections will be busted.

Compare these numbers to total revenues, which grew 2.1% sequentially and 19.9% year over year and it's apparent that this segment has done most of the heavy-lifting.

The story is similar on the operating margin line as well. This is Amazon's most profitable segment, so it turned in a 21.4% margin in the last quarter compared to 5.1% and -0.3% for the North America and International segments.

But let's also look at the dollar value. The segment generated operating profit of $391 million, which is up 47.5% sequentially and 407.8% from last year. What this boils down to is that despite generating just 8% of sales, the segment generates 36.4% of operating profits.