Amazon shares surged nearly 9% after the company reported $200.6 billion in quarterly sales and its fastest AWS growth in 18 quarters.

Cloud sales boom as company ramps up data center buildout

Amazon delivered strong profits and net sales during its fiscal second quarter, helped by surging growth in its prominent cloud computing unit.

Amazon Web Services cloud revenue surged significantly, surpassing market forecasts. This strong performance was fueled by increased enterprise artificial intelligence spending. …