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Amazon CEO Andy Jassy speaks at the Bloomberg Technology Summit in San Francisco on June 8, 2022.

David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Amazon shares jumped 7% on Friday and neared an all-time high after the company reported better-than-expected earnings, driven by growth in its cloud computing and advertising businesses.

The stock is up about 32% for the year and touched $200.50 on Friday. Its highest close was $200, a mark the stock hit twice in July.

Revenue increased 11% in the quarter to $158.9 billion, topping the $157.2 billion estimate of analysts surveyed by LSEG. Earnings of $1.43 topped the average analyst estimate of $1.14.

Sales in the Amazon Web Services cloud business increased 19% to $27.4 billion, coming in just shy of analysts’ estimates, according to StreetAccount. That was an acceleration from 12% a year ago, but trailed growth at rivals Microsoft and Google, where cloud revenue increased 33% and 35%, respectively. Microsoft’s Azure number includes other cloud services.

Amazon’s capital expenditures surged 81% year over year to $22.62 billion, as the company continues to invest in data centers and equipment such as Nvidia processors to power artificial intelligence products. Amazon has launched several AI products in its cloud and e-commerce businesses, and it is also expected to announce a new version of its Alexa voice assistant powered by generative AI.

“Amazon has integrated AI into what is the most diverse tech footprint of any mega cap, with multi-billion revenue streams in e-commerce, advertising, subscriptions, online video, and cloud,” analysts at Roth MKM wrote in a note after the earnings report. They have a buy rating on the stock.

Brian Olsavsky, Amazon’s chief financial officer, said on the earnings call that the majority of the company’s 2024 capex spending is to support the growing need for technology infrastructure.

CEO Andy Jassy said the company plans to spend about $75 billion on capex in 2024 and that he suspects the company will spend more next year.

“The increased bumps here are really driven by generative AI,” Jassy said on the call. “It is a really unusually large, maybe once-in-a-lifetime type of opportunity,” he said, noting that shareholders “will feel good about this long term that we’re aggressively pursuing it.”

Advertising was another bright spot. Sales in the unit expanded 19% to $14.3 billion during the quarter, meeting expectations and outpacing growth in Amazon’s core retail business.

Amazon’s ad growth was about in line with Meta, which saw 18.7% expansion, and faster than growth at Google, which reported a 15% increase in ad revenue. Snap‘s sales also jumped 15% from a year earlier.

Amazon forecast revenue in the current quarter to be between $181.5 billion and $188.5 billion, which would represent growth of 7% to 11% year over year. The midpoint of that range, $185 billion, fell short of the average analyst estimate of $186.2 billion, according to LSEG.

— CNBC’s Ari Levy contributed to this report.

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Nvidia says its GPUs are a ‘generation ahead’ of Google’s AI chips

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Nvidia says its GPUs are a 'generation ahead' of Google's AI chips

Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang looks on as US President Donald Trump speaks at the US-Saudi Investment Forum at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC on November 19, 2025.

Brendan Smialowski | Afp | Getty Images

Nvidia on Tuesday said its tech remains a generation ahead of the industry, in response to Wall Street’s concerns that the company’s dominance of AI infrastructure could be threatened by Google’s AI chips.

“We’re delighted by Google’s success — they’ve made great advances in AI and we continue to supply to Google,” Nvidia said in a post on X. “NVIDIA is a generation ahead of the industry — it’s the only platform that runs every AI model and does it everywhere computing is done.”

The post came after Nvidia saw its shares fall 3% on Tuesday after a report that Meta, one of its key customers, could strike a deal with Google to use its tensor processing units for its data centers.

In its post, Nvidia said its chips are more flexible and powerful compared with so-called ASIC chips — such as Google’s TPUs — which are designed for a single company or function. Nvidia’s latest generation of chips are known as Blackwell.

“NVIDIA offers greater performance, versatility, and fungibility than ASICs,” Nvidia said in its post.

Nvidia has more than 90% of the market for artificial intelligence chips with its graphics processors, analysts say, but Google’s in-house chips have gotten increased attention in recent weeks as a viable alternative to the Blackwell chips, which are expensive but powerful.

Unlike Nvidia, Google doesn’t sell its TPU chips to other companies, but it uses them for internal tasks and allows companies to rent them through Google Cloud.

Earlier this month, Google released Gemini 3, a well-reviewed state-of-the-art AI model that was trained on the company’s TPUs, not Nvidia GPUs.

“We are experiencing accelerating demand for both our custom TPUs and Nvidia GPUs,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement. “We are committed to supporting both, as we have for years.”

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang addressed rising TPU competition on an earnings call earlier this month, noting that Google was a customer for his company’s GPU chips and that Gemini can run on Nvidia’s technology.

He also mentioned that he was in touch with Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google DeepMind.

Huang said that Hassabis texted him to say that the tech industry theory that using more chips and data will create more powerful AI models — often called “scaling laws” by AI developers — is “intact.” Nvidia says that scaling laws will lead to even more demand for the company’s chips and systems.

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Musk’s xAI to close $15 billion funding round in December: sources

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Musk's xAI to close  billion funding round in December: sources

Elon Musk attends the U.S.-Saudi Investment Forum in Washington, D.C., U.S., November 19, 2025.

Evelyn Hockstein | Reuters

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup xAI is expected to close a $15 billion round at a $230 billion pre-money valuation next month, sources familiar with the matter told CNBC’s David Faber.

The deadline for allocation is the end of day on Tuesday, with the round expected to close on Dec. 19, the sources said.

This confirms earlier CNBC reporting that the company was raising $15 billion. The Tesla CEO later called the report on the round “False” in a post on the social media platform X.

At the time, sources told CNBC that xAI would use a large portion of the money for funding graphics processing units responsible for powering large language models.

CNBC had previously reported in September that the startup was looking to raise $10 billion at a $200 billion valuation.

The funding round is yet another sign of the insatiable demand for AI tools. Companies, including OpenAI and Anthropic, have raised billions and reached sky-high valuations as investors pour more money into companies building foundational AI models.

Sam Altman‘s OpenAI finalized a $6.6 billion-share sale at a $500 billion valuation last month, and Reuters recently reported that the ChatGPT maker was eying a $1 trillion initial public offering.

Anthropic closed a $13 billion funding round in September that roughly tripled its valuation from March.

Musk’s xAI is responsible for creating the Grok chatbot that has come under fire for disseminating hate speech, including antisemitic content. The company recently debuted Grokipedia, an AI-powered competitor to Wikipedia.

In March, Musk announced the merger of xAI with X in a deal valuing the social media platform at $33 billion.

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