From Seattle's own, GeekWire, October 30:
Amazon beat estimates for its third-quarter earnings with $180.2 billion in revenue, up 13% year-over-year, and earnings per share of $1.95, up from $1.43 in the year-ago period.
- Net income was $21.2 billion, up from $15.3 billion last year.
- Wall Street expected $177.7 billion in revenue, and earnings per share of $1.56.
Amazon shares were up more than 11% in after-hours trading. Growth in the company’s stock has lagged behind rivals Microsoft and Google this year.
Investors were likely pleased with a re-acceleration in Amazon’s closely watched cloud computing unit, which reported $33 billion in sales, up 20% year-over-year and topping analyst estimates. In a press release, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said AWS is “growing at a pace we haven’t seen since 2022.”
“We continue to see strong demand in AI and core infrastructure, and we’ve been focused on accelerating capacity — adding more than 3.8 gigawatts in the past 12 months,” Jassy added.
The cloud growth should help Amazon counter the Wall Street narrative that its cloud business is falling behind Microsoft and Google in pursuing the AI opportunity.
- Amazon and other cloud giants are pouring billions of dollars into capital expenditures to support AI initiatives. Amazon said earlier this year it expects to increase capital expenditures to more than $100 billion in 2025.
- The company makes most of its operating profits from AWS — $11.4 billion in the third quarter, more than half Amazon’s total operating income.
- AWS was hit with a major outage last week that took down several major sites and services. It blamed an internal issue within the cloud giant’s infrastructure.
Amazon’s overall operating income reached $17.4 billion in the third quarter — flat compared to a year ago. The company had forecast operating income of $15.5 billion to $20.5 billion....
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