The Globe and Mail reports in its Friday edition that Amazon posted sales in last year's final quarter that topped Wall Street estimates on Thursday, as a strong holiday shopping season boosted its retail business, but investors drove shares down owing to weakness in the cloud computing unit. A Reuters dispatch to The Globe says the company's cloud unit, Amazon Web Services (AWS), reported a 19-per-cent rise in revenue to $28.79-billion, falling short of estimates of $28.87-billion (all figures U.S.). Amazon joins smaller cloud providers Microsoft and Google in reporting weak cloud numbers. The cloud weakness comes when investors have grown increasingly impatient with Big Tech's multibillion-dollar capital spending and are hungry for returns from hefty investments in artificial intelligence. Still, Amazon's retail business helped offset the cloud weakness, with the company reporting on-line sales growth of 7 per cent in the quarter to $75.56-billion. That compared with estimates of $74.55-billion. The company reported revenue of $187.8-billion in the fourth quarter, compared with the average analyst estimate of $187.30-billion. Amazon's Canadian-traded shares closed Thursday at $28.35, up 33 cents on Cboe Canada.