AWS has been amassing a stockpile of IPv4 addresses, a stockpile that could now be worth a whopping $4.5 billion.

The internet has been transitioning to IPv6 addresses, but many companies still rely on IPv4. Unfortunately, because of the limited supply of available addresses, companies are often hard-pressed to continue using them, prompting AWS to begin charging for public IPv4 addresses, effective February 1, 2024.

According to Cisco Umbrella’s Andree Toonk, AWS has been growing its stockpile of IPv4 addresses at a significant rate:

Three years ago, I wrote a blog titled “AWS and their Billions in IPv4 addresses “in which I estimated AWS owned about $2.5 billion worth of IPv4 addresses. AWS has continued to grow incredibly, and so has its IPv4 usage. In fact, it’s grown so much that it will soon start to charge customers for IPv4 addresses! Enough reason to check in again, three years later, to see what AWS’ IPv4 estate looks like today.

Toonk says AWS now owns 127,972,688 IPv4 addresses, with each address valued at approximately $35.

Based on this data from ipv4.global, the average price for an IPv4 address is currently ~$35 dollars. With that estimate, we can determine the value of AWS’s IPv4 estate today to about 4.5 Billion dollars. An increase of 2 Billion compared to three years ago!

AWS clearly has managed to carve out a profitable slice of the IPv4 market.