Amazon reports third-quarter earnings Thursday afternoon with more demand for its cloud services than it can serve, driven by AI labs such as Anthropic and OpenAI along with growth in its traditional cloud business.
One big question for Wall Street going into the report is what Amazon might signal about next year’s spending as it tries to keep up with that demand.
CEO Andy Jassy said on an Andreessen Horowitz podcast last week that AWS capacity is largely booked for this year and next, along with “a good chunk of ’28.”
Amazon has said it expects to spend about $220 billion on capital expenditures this year, largely on AI and cloud infrastructure, up from its earlier plan of $200 billion. Even at that level, Jassy said, Amazon is “leaving a meaningful amount of demand on the table.”
Past spending pushed Amazon’s free cash flow to negative $7.6 billion for the 12 months ending in June, as the cost to add data centers, chips and other equipment exceeded the cash its operations brought in. Jassy gave no indication of slowing down, saying the company “could invest a lot more and it wouldn’t be a bad use of capital.”
Core numbers: Analysts expect revenue of about $202 billion, up 12% from a year ago, according to Yahoo Finance. That’s at the top of Amazon’s own forecast of $197 billion to $202 billion.
Analysts expect earnings of $1.96 per share, about the same as a year ago.
Amazon’s sales growth will likely look slower this time, about 12%, down from 20% last quarter. A big reason is timing. Prime Day, the company’s biggest sales event of the year, fell in the second quarter this year, rather than the third quarter as it did last year, so this quarter is up against a tougher comparison.
Amazon estimated in July that the shift would take nearly 4 percentage points off its growth rate this quarter. It hits online store sales hardest: analysts expect them to grow only about 3%, according to Zacks.
AWS: Amazon Web Services, the company’s cloud business, generates the majority of its operating profit. AWS revenue grew 37% to $42.2 billion in the second quarter, its fastest pace since 2021 and the fifth straight quarter of faster growth.
Analysts expect AWS revenue of about $45.4 billion this time, up 37.5%, according to Zacks. Wedbush is more optimistic, projecting growth of about 41%.
AWS had $496 billion in signed contracts it hadn’t yet delivered as of June, more than double the year before. That means its growth depends largely on how quickly Amazon can bring new data centers online.
“Capacity, not demand, is the constraint,” Yorkville Ives analyst Dan Ives wrote of the industry in a note Sunday.
Jassy said on the a16z podcast that running AI models is still “an order of magnitude too expensive” for businesses to use them widely, and that Amazon’s custom chips, including its Trainium AI processors, are a big piece of bringing that cost down. Amazon said in July that its chip business was on pace for more than $25 billion in annual revenue.
Anthropic stake: Amazon’s reported earnings could look very different. That’s because its profit fluctuates significantly depending on the value of its stake in Anthropic.
Last quarter, $53.4 billion in pre-tax gains, mostly on Anthropic, pushed Amazon’s earnings to $5.75 per share, against expectations of $1.82.
Anthropic filed paperwork Monday for a planned IPO on the Nasdaq. Amazon’s stake in the AI company was valued at about $190 billion as of June 30, according to Amazon’s latest quarterly filing. That includes about $92 billion in gains on convertible notes, a form of loan that turns into stock, which haven’t yet been counted in Amazon’s profit. Those notes would convert to Anthropic stock when it goes public.
Anthropic is also one of Amazon’s biggest cloud customers. Its IPO filing shows commitments to spend at least $110 billion on Amazon’s computing capacity into the 2030s, behind the $114.5 billion it committed to Google, as GeekWire reported Tuesday. Anthropic also said in the filing that it has asked its cloud providers for more computing power than they were willing to supply.
Shopping agents: Amazon blocked Meta’s new Muse AI agent from its store last month, escalating a fight over who controls the customer relationship when software does the buying. Amazon said Muse broke its rule requiring agents to identify themselves.
Agents that shop on a customer’s behalf could bypass Amazon’s advertising business, which depends on people browsing its pages. Ad revenue grew 26% to $19.8 billion last quarter, and analysts expect about $20.8 billion this time, up 18%, according to Zacks.
“Investor questions remain on agentic commerce risk, particularly to advertising, but we see limited risk,” Wedbush analyst Ygal Arounian wrote in an Oct. 16 note, citing Amazon’s logistics advantage and its role connecting shoppers with sellers.
Amazon is trying to give shoppers fewer reasons to look elsewhere. It now lists 250 million products sold on other retailers’ sites, about 2.5 times as many as in March, The Information reported Wednesday. On the seller side, Amazon opened its tools to outside AI agents in September, starting with Anthropic’s Claude.
Cloud rivals: Microsoft and Alphabet report quarterly results Wednesday afternoon, a day before Amazon. Microsoft’s report is its first under a new structure that breaks out Azure cloud revenue every quarter.
Check back with GeekWire on Thursday afternoon for coverage.
