From Yahoo Finance, October 26:
Amazon beats earning estimates, touts AI as the future of its financials
Amazon (AMZN) enters the AI hype zone.
Shares of the e-commerce beast surged 6% in pre-market trading on Friday following above consensus earnings, and supported by bullish comments around artificial intelligence.
CEO Andy Jassy told analysts on the earnings call that AI represents an opportunity worth "tens of billions" for Amazon's cloud business, Amazon Web Services (AWS). This year, AWS launched its Bedrock AI service, which streamlines the development of large language models.
“Our generative AI business is growing very, very quickly,” said Jassy.
In September, Amazon invested $1.25 billion in Open AI competitor Anthropic. The investment could go up to $4 billion over time.
AI could provide the growth spurt that AWS is looking for. In Q3, the division fell slightly short of analysts' net sales expectations, coming in at $23.06 billion, against the $23.13 billion Wall Street expected.
However, there were silver linings, as AWS sales were up 12% year-over-year and the division's operating income is also on the upswing, coming in at $7 billion, a roughly 29% increase from last year. That 12% growth is "just enough to keep the goblins away," Jefferies analyst Brent Thill wrote on Thursday after earnings.
It's been a week of mixed cloud results, making Jassy's comments stick out....
....MUCH MORE
Here is the conference call transcript via The Motley Fool.
And here are the conference call slides from the company. (19 page PDF)
The stock is up $6.50 (+5.44%) at $126.07in late pre-market action and seems to be encouraging the rest of the Nasdaq 100, up .70% after yesterday's whackage.
The big dog, AAPL reports November 2.
