Oct 30 (Reuters) - Amazon.com ( AMZN ) forecast

quarterly revenue largely above Wall Street estimates on

Thursday on strong demand for its cloud services as businesses

continue to spend relentlessly on artificial intelligence.

The massive cloud demand is helping the tech company ease

the pressure from weaker growth at its e-commerce business,

which is gearing up for the holiday season amid weakness in

consumer confidence stemming from global trade uncertainty.

Amazon ( AMZN ) projected net sales of between $206 billion and

$213.0 billion in the fourth quarter, while analysts on average

were expecting revenue of $208.12 billion, according to data

compiled by LSEG.

Its cloud unit, Amazon Web Services, reported a 20% rise in

revenue in the third quarter ending in September, compared with

the estimates of a 17.95% increase.

The strong results from AWS, the world's largest cloud

provider, followed stellar cloud revenue growth reported on

Wednesday by Microsoft's ( MSFT ) Azure and Google

Cloud, the No. 2 and No. 3 players in the industry,

respectively.

Microsoft ( MSFT ), Google-parent Alphabet and Facebook owner Meta

all announced plans for higher annual capital expenditures as

they pour money into chips and data centers.

AWS typically accounts for a little more than 15% of

Amazon's ( AMZN ) total revenue, but the segment is a huge profit engine,

making up roughly 60% of the company's total operating income.

The unit reported revenue growth of 17.5% in the second quarter.

(Reporting by Deborah Sophia in Bengaluru; Editing by Anil

D'Silva)