Mathur, a former Amazon engineer, joined the fledgling company on an H‑1B visa in 2003, when the Seattle startup was still renting a cramped building and posting quarterly losses. He says the initial AWS team counted roughly 100 foreign workers, many on H‑1B, who set up the cloud infrastructure that later became a profit engine.
AWS net sales hit $128.7 billion in 2025, up 20 percent from the previous year, while its operating income rose to $45.6 billion – more than half of Amazon’s $80 billion total. The cloud arm accounts for 18 percent of the retailer’s $716.9 billion revenue but supplies 57 percent of earnings. In Q2 2026, AWS sales leapt 37 percent to $42.2 billion and its operating income climbed to $16.6 billion, representing 60.5 percent of the company's earnings.
On Oct 8 2026, Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling and Vice‑President JD Vance announced the Department of Labor had suspended PERM applications for eight firms: Cognizant, Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services, Wipro, HCL Technologies, Capgemini, Microsoft and Adobe. The suspension covers new applications and pending ones; the outsourcing giants were halted outright, while Microsoft and Adobe faced investigations. Vance highlighted Microsoft’s 6,000 American worker layoffs last year against 6,300 H‑1B visas and nearly 3,000 green‑card approvals.
Microsoft said it would comply with the new rule, and TCS confirmed it would follow any Department of Labor instructions. Senators from both parties have urged regulators to tighten scrutiny of tech hiring practices, and the suspension is expected to prompt a review of the PERM process. The next week, the Department of Labor will hold a public hearing to discuss potential reforms to the green‑card sponsorship framework.