Amazon Web Services (AWS) is growing at such a terrific rate that it’s poised to hit $10 billion in annual sales this year, according to company founder Jeff Bezos.

If true, and there’s no real reason to doubt Bezos, it would mean AWS is growing even faster than its parent company Amazon.com, Inc.

“This year, Amazon became the fastest company ever to reach $100 billion in annual sales,” Bezos said in a letter to shareholders. “Also this year, Amazon Web Services is reaching $10 billion in annual sales … doing so at a pace even faster than Amazon achieved that milestone.”

Bezos’ note comes just a few weeks after AWS hit its ten-year milestone, having launched back in 2006. Bezos said in his note that AWS set the trend for cloud computing, and he now thinks that most companies will eventually stop running their own data centers at all, instead storing all of the data in the cloud.

“Many characterized AWS as a bold – and unusual – bet when we started,” Bezos said. ““What does this have to do with selling books?’ We could have stuck to the knitting. I’m glad we didn’t. Or did we? Maybe the knitting has as much to do with our approach as the arena. AWS is customer obsessed, inventive and experimental, long-term oriented, and cares deeply about operational excellence.”

One of the biggest reasons for AWS’ success is that the company is “customer-focused”, Bezos said, in contrast to most technology firms which are “competitor focused”. He said that while most companies follow others, AWS instead listens to its customers.

“90 to 95% of what we build in AWS is driven by what customers tell us they want,” Bezos insisted.

He cited the example of AWS’ Aurora database, which the company created after customers asked if Amazon could eliminate the trade-off between expensive, proprietary databases, and free, open-source, but less powerful engines like MySQL and Postgres.

“This has struck a resonant chord with customers, and Aurora is the fastest-growing service in the history of AWS,” Bezos continued.

Bezos also revealed AWS has no plans of giving up its significant lead in the race for cloud dominance, saying the company will press ahead with plans to build more data centers across the world and add new services.

“We’ll offer more and more capabilities to let builders build unfettered, it will get easier and easier to collect, store and analyze data,” he said. “[And] we’ll continue to add more geographic locations, and we’ll continue to see growth in mobile and ‘connected’ device applications.”

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