Amazon CEO Andy Jassy speaks at the Bloomberg Technology Summit in San Francisco on June 8, 2022.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Amazon is slated to report fourth-quarter earnings Thursday after the closing bell.
Here’s what analysts are projecting:
Earnings per share: 80 cents, according to LSEG, formerly known as Refinitiv
Revenue: $166.2 billion, according to LSEG
Amazon Web Services: $24.2 billion, according to StreetAccount
Advertising: $14.2 billion, according to StreetAccount
Amazon is expected to report a sizable spike in profits compared to last year’s holiday quarter, when the company was contending with higher costs tied to inflation, the war in Ukraine and supply chain constraints. At that time, Amazon was finishing up its slowest year of growth in the company’s history, with sales for the year increasing just 9.4%.
Since then, growth has reaccelerated and profits have rebounded, as Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has slashed costs dramatically and consumer spending has proven resilient. The company laid off more than 27,000 employees between late 2022 and mid-2023, and it has continued to cut roles this year. In January, Amazon said it would let go of employees across units including Prime Video, MGM Studios, Twitch, Audible and Buy with Prime.
“This may be a signal that, similar to Meta, Amazon is continuing its Years of Efficiency into ’24,” analysts at Evercore wrote in a Monday note. The firm has an outperform rating on Amazon’s stock.
Shares of Amazon rallied 77% in 2023, as Wall Street applauded Jassy’s belt-tightening efforts. The stock is up almost 4% so far this year, while the S&P 500 has gained about 2% during the same stretch.
Analysts expect net income of $8.4 billion, or 80 cents per share, for the period ending Dec. 31, 2023, compared to $278 million, or 3 cents per share, a year earlier. Revenue is projected to expand 11.4% during the quarter. Although that’s slower than the growth rate for the third quarter, it’s an acceleration from the year-ago period when sales climbed just over 8%.
The quarter will include results from the holiday shopping season and Amazon’s October Prime Day deals event. Holiday sales online and in brick-and-mortar stores rose 3.8% year over year to $964.4 billion, according to the National Retail Federation, coming in at the high end of its prior expectation of a rise between 3% and 4%.
Wall Street will be focusing on growth rates in Amazon’s cloud computing unit, where revenue is expected to increase roughly 13% year over year, which is slightly faster than the previous quarter, when it showed growth of 12%.
For the past year, growth in AWS has decelerated, as businesses trimmed their cloud spend. But Amazon executives signaled some improvement in last quarter’s earnings call, with Chief Financial Officer Brian Olsavsky telling reporters in October that the company was “starting to see more and more new workloads come up.”
Analysts are optimistic that AWS will benefit from strong demand for generative artificial intelligence, as companies increasingly require more compute power and infrastructure to run AI models. In November, Amazon launched “Q,” an AI chatbot for businesses, as well as new Trainium chips for AI applications. It also operates Bedrock, a generative AI service for AWS customers.
Amazon’s other high-margin business, advertising, will also be a key area to watch, with revenue projected to grow 23% to $14.2 billion. This week, Amazon joined streaming peers such as Netflix, Disney‘s Hulu and Warner Bros. Discovery‘s Max by introducing ads to Prime Video programming.
Analysts at Citi, who have a buy rating on Amazon shares, forecast Prime Video ads to generate at least $5 billion of “incremental revenue over time,” the firm wrote in a Tuesday note.
Amazon will discuss the report on a conference call with analysts at 5:30 p.m. ET.
A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket is shown on its launch pad carrying Amazon’s Project Kuiper internet network satellites as the vehicle is prepared for launch at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Cape Canaveral, Florida, U.S., April 28, 2025.
Steve Nesius | Reuters
United Launch Alliance on Monday was forced to delay the second flight carrying a batch of Amazon‘s Project Kuiper internet satellites because of a problem with the rocket booster.
With roughly 30 minutes left in the countdown, ULA announced it was scrubbing the launch due to an issue with “an elevated purge temperature” within its Atlas V rocket’s booster engine. The company said it will provide a new launch date at a later point.
“Possible issue with a GN2 purge line that cannot be resolved inside the count,” ULA CEO Tory Bruno said in a post on Bluesky. “We will need to stand down for today. We’ll sort it and be back.”
The launch from Florida’s Space Coast had been set for last Friday, but was rescheduled to Monday at 1:25 p.m. ET due to inclement weather.
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Amazon in April successfully sent up 27 Kuiper internet satellites into low Earth orbit, a region of space that’s within 1,200 miles of the Earth’s surface. The second voyage will send “another 27 satellites into orbit, bringing our total constellation size to 54 satellites,” Amazon said in a blog post.
Kuiper is the latest entrant in the burgeoning satellite internet industry, which aims to beam high-speed internet to the ground from orbit. The industry is currently dominated by Elon Musk’s Space X, which operates Starlink. Other competitors include SoftBank-backed OneWeb and Viasat.
Amazon is targeting a constellation of more than 3,000 satellites. The company has to meet a Federal Communications Commission deadline to launch half of its total constellation, or 1,618 satellites, by July 2026.
Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, speaks at a cloud computing conference held by the company in 2019.
Michael Short | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Google apologized for a major outage that the company said was caused by multiple layers of flawed recent updates.
The company released an incident report late on Friday that explained hours of downtime on Thursday. More than 70 Google cloud services stopped working properly across the globe, knocking down or disrupting dozens of third-party services, including Cloudflare, OpenAI and Shopify. Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Google Meet and other first-party products also malfunctioned.
“We deeply apologize for the impact this outage has had,” Google wrote in the incident report. “Google Cloud customers and their users trust their businesses to Google, and we will do better. We apologize for the impact this has had not only on our customers’ businesses and their users but also on the trust of our systems. We are committed to making improvements to help avoid outages like this moving forward.”
Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google’s cloud unit, also posted about the outage in an X post on Thursday, saying “we regret the disruption this caused our customers.”
Google in May added a new feature to its “quota policy checks” for evaluating automated incoming requests, but the new feature wasn’t immediately tested in real-world situations, the company wrote in the incident report. As a result, the company’s systems didn’t know how to properly handle data from the new feature, which included blank entries. Those blank entries were then sent out to all Google Cloud data center regions, which prompted the crashes, the company wrote.
Engineers figured out the issue in 10 minutes, according to the company. However, the entire incident went on for seven hours after that, with the crash leading to an overload in some larger regions.
As it released the feature, Google did not use feature flags, an increasingly common industry practice that allows for slow implementation to minimize impact if problems occur. Feature flags would have caught the issue before the feature became widely available, Google said.
Going forward, Google will change its architecture so if one system fails, it can still operate without crashing, the company said. Google said it will also audit all systems and improve its communications “both automated and human, so our customers get the information they need asap to react to issues.”
AMD CEO Lisa Su unveils the AMD vision for Advancing Al.
Courtesy: AMD
Shares of Advanced Micro Devices rose nearly 9% on Monday after analysts at Piper Sandler lifted their price target on the stock on optimism about the chipmaker’s latest product announcement.
The analysts said they see a snapback for AMD’s graphics processing units, or GPUs, in the fourth quarter. That’s when they expect the chipmaker to be through the bulk of the $800 million in charges that AMD said it would incur as a result of a new U.S. license requirement that applies to exports of semiconductors to China and other countries.
Last week, AMD revealed its next-generation artificial intelligence chips, the Instinct MI400 series. Notably, the company unveiled a full-server rack called Helios that enables thousands of the chips to be tied together. That chip system is expected to be important for AI customers such as cloud companies and developers of large language models.
AMD CEO Lisa Su showed the products on stage at an event in San Jose, California, alongside OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who said they sounded “totally crazy.”
“Overall, we are enthused with the product launches at the AMD event this week, specifically the Helios rack, which we think is pivotal for AMD Instinct growth,” the analysts wrote in their note.
Piper Sandler raised its price target for AMD’s share price from $125 to $140.
The stock jumped past $126 on Monday to close at its highest level since Jan. 7, before President Donald Trump announced sweeping new tariffs and AMD warned of the chip control charges.