Blog

Amazon is slated to post results for the third quarter after the closing bell Thursday.

Here’s what analysts polled by LSEG are looking for:

• Earnings per share: $1.57
• Revenue: $177.8 billion

Wall Street is also looking at other key revenue numbers:

• Amazon Web Services: $32.42 billion expected
• Advertising: $17.34 billion expected

AWS growth will be a major focus for investors once again, as the company faces intensifying pressure from cloud competitors Google and Microsoft, which also reported quarterly results this week.

Revenue at AWS is projected to expand 18.1% year over year, which is about the same growth rate as the second quarter. Google’s cloud revenue accelerated 34% during the third quarter, while Microsoft Azure recorded growth of 40%.

AWS stumbled last week during an extended outage that lasted more than 15 hours, taking down numerous websites as a result. Microsoft experienced outages in its Azure cloud and 365 services on Wednesday, hours before its scheduled earnings release.

The Amazon unit is also battling the perception that it’s missing out on a flurry of highly lucrative artificial intelligence deals for cloud services.

Anthropic and Google deepened their cloud partnership last week in a deal worth tens of billions of dollars, while Meta has inked hefty cloud deals with Google and Oracle in recent months.

Amazon on Wednesday opened its $11 billion AI data center called Project Rainier, which was first announced last December and is intended to train and run models from Claude chatbot creator Anthropic.

Amazon, which has invested $8 billion in Anthropic, said the startup will use 1 million of its custom Trainium2 chips by the end of 2025.

During last quarter’s earnings conference call, investors grilled Amazon CEO Andy Jassy on AWS growth and AI competition.

Jassy reiterated AWS has a “pretty significant” leadership position in cloud market share, while noting that it’s still “early” days in the AI industry that remains “very top heavy” with a “small number of very large frontier models.”

Amazon’s core retail business will also be top of mind for investors as the company gears up for the start of the holiday shopping period. Amazon said earlier this month it planned to hire 250,000 workers to staff up for peak season, the same number as the last two years.

Adobe Analytics recently projected that online holiday spending in the U.S. will jump 5.3% year over year to $253.4 billion, which is slower than last year, when online sales grew 8.7% over the same period.

During the third quarter, Amazon held its annual Prime Day deals event. Online spending reached $24.1 billion in the U.S. across the four-day stretch in July, according to Adobe, exceeding its estimates and representing growth of 30.3% year over year.

Jassy told investors last quarter that President Donald Trump’s shifting tariff policies haven’t dented demand or driven up prices so far this year.

Amazon’s third-quarter sales are expected to increase 11.9% year over year, compared with growth of 13% in the second quarter.

For the fourth quarter, analysts surveyed by LSEG are projecting sales to reach $208.1 billion, representing growth of 10.8% from a year earlier.

Amazon on Tuesday initiated massive layoffs, cutting about 14,000 roles across nearly every area of the company. Executives hinted that more cuts may be on the way in the new year as the company looks to get leaner, reduce bureaucracy and invest further in AI.

Once the job reductions are complete, they’re expected to be the largest corporate cuts in Amazon’s history, CNBC previously reported. Amazon laid off more than 27,000 employees between 2022 and 2023.

Shares of Amazon have increased 4.9% so far this year, while the Nasdaq is up approximately 24% over the same stretch.