In a press conference today, Amazon Web Services Senior Vice President Andy Jassy said that CEO and Founder Jeff Bezos believes AWS could be the company’s largest business.

Amazon reported $61 billion in revenues  for the 2012 fiscal year. The company does not report revenues for AWS but it is widely believed to be a $3.5 billion business and growing rapidly.

Amazon built its business on e-commerce, and it remains the primary focus for the company. But the demand for cheap computing and storage power continues to scale as app development mushrooms and more people connect through their smartphones and other devices.

Bezos has said before that AWS could be as big as its retail business, but saying it could be bigger shows far more confidence in the future of its cloud business.

Here’s the full text of what Jassy said at the press conference:

Jeff is very excited about the AWS business and he believes – like the rest of the leadership team does – that in the fullness of time- it is very possible that AWS could be the biggest business at Amazon.

Gartner Research shows AWS as the far and away leader in the public cloud market, declaring that AWS is five times bigger than the other 14 companies combined that are included in the research.

The viewpoint is undoubtedly optimistic but consider the IT market. It’s a trillion-dollar business that is moving to the cloud. If AWS gets a fraction of that business, then Bezos’s statement is an easy one to believe.