Amazon (AMZN) has been the New York Yankees of Wall Street lately. You either love it or you hate it. While the company has consistently made leaps and bounds in terms of its revenue growth, it has largely remained unprofitable, even 20 years after coming onto the market. Some analysts have joked that it’s the largest charity in the country, simply because it makes no money.

Yet for an unprofitable company, Amazon seems to generate a lot of excitement on Wall Street. The reason? It’s largely based on the assumption that Amazon will one day rule the world. After all, the company comes up in the news just about every other week with either a new venture or a significant improvement to a current one—that’s where all that money is going, and it seems as if the majority of investors are fine with that.

So is it any surprise that the company’s shares popped 15% after last Thursday’s earnings report? Revenue came in at $22.72 billion, up 15.1% year over year and beating estimates by $330 million, and the company saw earnings per share at -$0.12, beating the expectation by $0.01. So sure, the company beat estimates on both revenue and earnings. But did you catch that -$0.12 earnings per share bit? That’s a loss of $57 million. Even with the beat, what justified such a huge spike?

AWS

The answer is Amazon Web Services (AWS). For the first time in history, Amazon reported figures for its cloud business service. Up until this point, analysts had no way to gauge the business segment’s performance. Well, it looks like Amazon should have started reporting the numbers sooner, because they proved that AWS is much more valuable than anyone thought.

For Q1 2015, AWS saw revenues of $1.57 billion, which was an increase of 49% from the previous year. And despite its aggressive pricing (it’s made 42 price cuts in its history), it had an operating profit of $265 million, an 8% increase over last year. This was well ahead of the general Wall Street sentiment  that AWS was in investment mode and was losing 5-10% or more.

"Amazon Web Services is a $5 billion business and still growing fast -- in fact it's accelerating,” CEO Jeff Bezos said on the earnings call. “Born a decade ago, AWS is a good example of how we approach ideas and risk-taking at Amazon." And with that, investors were re-sold on the story and Amazon blasted through its previous all-time high to reach a new one at $452.65.

Defying the odds

That’s quite the story, considering Amazon dipped below $300 just three months ago. On the back of the idea that Amazon may never get over its spending binge. It even prompted one anyoption writer to pen the letter “To Amazon from Investors, with Love” in an attempt to capture investor sentiment after a recent disappointing earnings report.

But in spite of the odds (and the hate), Amazon’s stock is now up 43% year-to-date, proving to the bears that it has never fit the mold of the typical Wall Street stock and it likely never will. And this is why it’s so interesting to see that the company decided to release AWS financial data now. Was it simply to prove to investors that there’s no reason to fear? Heaven knows it’s not just another gimmick like the Amazon Fire Phone. Regardless, it worked and Amazon received three upgrades from Janney, JPMorgan (JPM) and Raymond James (RJF).

JPMorgan analyst Doug Anmuth values AWS at $66.3 billion and has a price target of $535 for Amazon.

Conclusion

Let’s go back and review the general state of Amazon. While the company typically doesn’t earn a penny in profit, it’s different than the majority of firms that see losses because it does so by choice. This means that the company can quickly turn the investment spigot off at any time and watch the earnings bucket overflow.

But that’s not the game plan, at least not as long as Jeff Bezos is in charge. Yes, Amazon wants to rule the world one day. It wants to be present in every aspect of our lives. For most customers, that’s not an issue because Amazon has done a bang-up job creating conveniences where they weren’t even imagined. Not everyone is comfortable with Amazon’s strategy. It can be enormously difficult to get on that roller coaster and watch it go up and down as the average investor isn’t sure how it feels.

But if you’re interested in being on the sidelines to watch an empire be built from the ground up, earnings or no earnings, Amazon is the place to be. When will we see profits from this outlier? Who knows? But one thing is for certain. Amazon isn’t just here to stay. It’s only going to get bigger.