Amazon signs Time Warner's Turner unit as cloud customer

Amazon.com Inc said Time Warner Inc’s broadcast unit Turner had signed up for its Amazon Web Services (AWS), a notable contract win for the Seattle tech company as competition within the fast-growing cloud computing market intensifies.

As part of the deal, Turner, the company behind CNN, TNT and several other cable channels, will be migrating “decades of content” and much of its computing operations to AWS, it said in a statement on Tuesday.

The two companies did not say how much the deal was worth.

Historically, Turner has kept most of its computing and storage operations in its own data centers.

In the past year, AWS grew by 42 percent year-on-year. It accounts for nearly 32 percent of the cloud computing market, which is estimated to be worth $14.4 billion as of the third quarter of 2017, according to research firm Canalys.

But Microsoft Corp and Alphabet Inc’s Google are growing faster. In the third quarter of 2017, Microsoft’s Azure had annual growth of 90 percent to claim 14 percent of the market, while Google Cloud Platform grew 76 percent and now holds 6 percent of the market, Canalys said.