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The numbers $33 billion: How much Amazon made in the third quarter from its cloud-computing business, Amazon Web Services—up 20% year-over-year and beating analyst projections. AWS now has an annualized revenue run rate of $132 billion. $17.7 billion: How much Amazon made from advertising in the second quarter, an increase of 24% year-over-year. 13%: The amount that Amazon’s total net sales increased compared to last year’s Q3 earnings, to $180.2 billion. $1.8 billion: What Amazon expects to pay in severance fees related to layoffs, which started this week when the company announced cuts of around 14,000 corporate jobs. Reuters and The Wall Street Journal both reported that the total number of affected jobs is expected to hit 30,000. -69%: The drop in Amazon’s free cash flow—down to $14.8 billion versus the $47.7 billion reported in Q3 last year—largely due to capital investments related to artificial intelligence. 60%: Increase in the number of rural communities that have access to Amazon’s Same-Day and Next-Day Delivery over the last four months. 250 million: How many people have used Rufus, Amazon’s generative AI shopping assistant, so far this year. The company claims people who use Rufus are 60% more likely to complete a purchase. $2.5 billion: The settlement Amazon had to pay this quarter after the FTC proved it misled people and made it exceedingly difficult to cancel subscriptions. The watercooler talk CEO Andy Jassy kicked off Amazon’s Q3 earnings call by discussing AWS, the company’s cloud-computing business, noting that the 20% growth rate is a return to a pace the company hasn’t seen since 2022. He also teased “several” new AWS deals signed in October that haven’t yet been announced. “AWS is where the preponderance of companies data and workloads reside, and part of why most companies want to run AI on AWS,” Jassy said. The AWS growth numbers outpaced analysts’ expectations. The company’s shares jumped as much as 14% in after-hours trading. The company still has more demand for AWS services than it has capacity for, however. Currently, the bottleneck is in power, Jassy said, though it could at some point shift to chips. Amazon has added 3.8 gigawatts of power to its AWS infrastructure in the last year, with another gigawatt coming in Q4. For its advertising division, Amazon highlighted deals with Netflix, Spotify, and SiriusXM. The ads business saw 24% growth from the year prior, to $17.7 billion in revenue. The key quote Agentic commerce is coming. While it’s become very easy to buy things online when you know what you want, a physical store with a physical salesperson still has some advantages over ecommerce when you don’t know exactly what you want, Jassy explained in response to an investor question about agentic. But that’s going to change as AI agents get better at guiding online shopping experiences, he said. “AI and agentic commerce solutions are going to expand the amount of shopping that happens online,” Jassy said. “That’s really good for customers, and I think it’s really good for Amazon, because at the end of the day, you’re going to buy from the outfit that allows you to have the broadest selection, great value, and continues to deliver for you very quickly and reliably.”
