Amazon reported a 19% increase in online ad revenue in the first quarter, beating analysts’ estimates.

Ad sales climbed to $13.92 billion, while analysts on average were expecting $13.74 billion, according to StreetAccount.

The numbers were contained in Amazon’s first-quarter earnings report. The company reported total first-quarter sales of $155.67 billion, compared to Wall Street projections of $155.04 billion.

Although Amazon’s online ad business represents a fraction of overall sales, it has emerged in recent years to become the third-biggest platform in the global digital advertising market, behind only Alphabet and Meta.

Online advertising is a particular area of focus for investors due to economic uncertainty and increasing tensions between the U.S. and China over trade. While President Donald Trump’s China tariffs will likely affect Amazon’s core retail business, the company’s online ad unit could also feel some pain.

So far, tech companies with online ad businesses have reported solid first-quarter earnings, but warned of potentially tougher times later in the year.

Meta reported stronger-than-expected first-quarter earnings this week, but said ad sales in the Asia-Pacific region came in at $8.22 billion for the quarter, trailing analysts’ estimates of $8.42 billion.

The company’s finance chief Susan Li said during an earnings call that “Asia-based e-commerce exporters” have slowed their online ad spending likely due to the de minimis trade loophole ending this Friday.

When Alphabet reported first-quarter earnings last Thursday, it revealed that ad sales grew 8.5% year over year to $66.89 billion and YouTube ad revenue increased 10% to $8.93 billion. But Alphabet executives told analysts that it expects headwinds to its Asia-Pacific-focused advertising business.

Snap on Tuesday said it had “experienced headwinds to start the current quarter,” which resulted in the company saying it would not provide guidance.

Last week, Microsoft reported its latest quarterly earnings and said search and news advertising sales, minus payments to its affiliates, grew 15% year over year to $449 million.

Reddit also reported first-quarter earnings on Thursday that beat on sales and guidance. The company’s first-quarter sales soared 61% year over year to $392 million.

Although Reddit’s second-quarter guidance topped analysts’ projections, CEO Steve Huffman said there is some economic shakiness.

“Ever-shifting macro environments like these create both challenges and opportunities,” Huffman wrote in a letter to shareholders. “We’ve grown through challenging times before — people need connection and information just as much in uncertain times.”

Pinterest reports earnings on May 8.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has made tens of billions of dollars in recent years from his stake in the chipmaker, but he’s getting his first salary increase in a decade.

Huang’s base salary rose to $1.5 million, a 49% increase from 2024, according to a proxy filing with the SEC on Thursday. His variable cash also went up by $1 million, or 50%, from the 2024 fiscal year. Stock awards grew to $38.8 million, bringing total pay to $49.9 million.

The compensation committee “believed this was appropriate in consideration of internal pay equity with the base salaries” of other top executives, the filing said, and “it represented Mr. Huang’s first base salary increase in 10 years.”

Nvidia is in the midst of a boom that’s turned it into one of the most valuable companies in the world, thanks to its graphics processing units (GPUs) that power the most powerful artificial intelligence models and workloads. Revenue in the 2025 fiscal year jumped 114% to $130.5 billion, the company reported in February.

The company’s stock price increased more than ninefold between the end of 2022 and the end of last year. Huang’s roughly 3.5% stake is currently worth about $94 billion.

Huang’s 2025 pay also included $3.5 million in residential security and consultation fees and driver services, the company said in the filing. In the previous year, residential security and consultation fees for Huang totaled $2.2 million. 

Google in a recent filing said it paid $8.27 million for CEO Sundar Pichai’s personal security and travel, representing a 22% increase from the year prior.

WATCH: Nvidia-Anthropic feud

Amazon’s cloud business grew at a slower pace than expected in the first quarter, a third straight revenue miss.

Revenue at Amazon Web Services increased 17% to $29.27 billion, while analysts polled by StreetAccount had expected $29.42 billion. The growth slowed from 18.9% in the fourth quarter.

AWS, which accounted for about 19% of its parent company’s total revenue, is the world’s top provider of cloud infrastructure. Microsoft, its top competitor, announced first-quarter Azure cloud growth and guidance for the business that exceeded consensus on Wednesday. Google, the No. 3 supplier, came in a touch below consensus on cloud revenue last week.

Cloud computing is still showing healthy growth despite signals elsewhere of a more challenging economy. Automakers and retailers have begun preparing for higher costs or lower demand because of sweeping tariffs on goods imported to the U.S. that President Donald Trump announced in early April.

Amazon said first-quarter AWS operating income totaled $11.55 billion, higher than the $10.52 billion StreetAccount consensus. The segment’s operating margin of 39.5% was the widest it has been at least since 2014.

During the quarter, AWS said it was launching a service for streaming video games, and forming an agentic artificial intelligence group.

Capital infrastructures for the quarter came out to $24.3 billion, up around 74% year over year. In February, management called for roughly $105 billion in 2025 capital spending, some of which will go toward data centers containing chips that can train and run artificial intelligence models from Anthropic and other cloud clients.

Amazon CEO and former AWS chief Andy Jassy said in an April letter to shareholders that the cost of AI for customers will come down over time, due in part to Amazon’s custom chips that represent an alternative to Nvidia graphics processing units.

The AWS AI business has billions in annualized revenue, Jassy said on a conference call with analysts.

” I think we could be helping more customers and driving more revenue for the business if we had more capacity,” he said. “We have a lot more Trainium2 instances and the next generation of Nvidia instances landing in the coming months.” Trainium2, announced in 2023, is Amazon’s next-generation chip for training AI models.

AWS has diversified away from China for components in the past six years, Jassy said.