Shares of Getty Images soared 19% on Friday after the company announced that it struck a multi‑year licensing agreement with Perplexity AI.

Perplexity will be able to display creative and editorial content from Getty Images through its AI-powered search tools as part of the deal, according to a release. The startup will also improve how it displays imagery on its platform by adding image credits and links to the source.

“Partnerships such as this support AI platforms to increase the quality and accuracy of information delivered to consumers, ultimately building a more engaging and reliable experience,” Nick Unsworth, vice president of strategic development at Getty Images, said in a statement.

The financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

Amazon shares soared 12% on Friday after the company reported an across-the-board beat for the third quarter and boosted its forecast for spending due to demand for artificial intelligence services.

Cloud was a major driver of revenue and profit growth, with sales at Amazon Web Services climbing 20% from a year earlier to $33 billion, topping expectations.

The unit generated operating income of $11.4 billion, accounting for roughly two-thirds of Amazon’s total operating profit.

Revenue in the digital advertising business, another growth engine, jumped 24% to $17.7 billion. Total sales at Amazon climbed 13% to $180.17 billion, topping the average analyst estimate of $177.8 billion, according to LSEG. Earnings per share came in at $1.95, exceeding the $1.57 average estimate.

“Amazon has a deep moat around their core businesses driven by their unmatched scale,” analysts at Pivotal Research wrote in a note after the report.

The analysts, who recommend buying the stock, said Amazon “appears to have numerous healthy organic growth opportunities driven by their high margin AWS cloud segment” and areas like advertising.

Coming into earnings, cloud was an area of key concern due to increased competition from Google and Microsoft, which also reported quarterly results this week. Google’s cloud revenue increased 34% during the third quarter, while Microsoft Azure recorded growth of 40%.

Amazon’s stock was up just 1.6% for the year ahead of the report, well behind its megacap peers.

While the company remains the leading provider of cloud infrastructure technology, it’s been battling the perception that it’s missing out on a flurry of highly lucrative AI deals for cloud services.

But when it comes to spending, Amazon is ahead of its rivals.

Amazon raised its forecast for capital expenditures this year, saying it now expects to spend $125 billion in 2025, up from an earlier estimate of $118 billion. CFO Brian Olsavsky said that number will likely increase in 2026. Google, Meta and Microsoft also lifted their capex guidance, but were all below Amazon.

For the current quarter, Amazon said it expects sales to be $206 billion to $213 billion. The midpoint of the revenue outlook, $209.5 billion, topped estimates of $208 billion, according to LSEG.

While investors are cheering Amazon’s results, it’s been a tough week for a wide swath of the company’s workforce.

On Tuesday, Amazon said it will lay off 14,000 corporate employees, as part of a push to make the company leaner and less bureaucratic, so it can move faster. More cuts are expected soon, and Jassy said it’s not “financially driven” or due to AI, “right now, at least.”

“It really, it’s culture,” Jassy said. “If you grow as fast as we did for several years, you know, the size of the businesses, the number of people, the number of locations, the types of businesses you’re in, you end up with a lot more people than what you had before, and you end up with a lot more layers.”

The company finished the quarter with about 1.58 million employees, which was a 2% increase from the year-ago period.

Sales in Amazon’s core online stores unit posted growth of 10% during the quarter, which includes the results of its Prime Day discount event in July.

WATCH: Apple will outperform Amazon

Tech’s internet giants have made it through earnings season, and they offered a consistent message to Wall Street: Artificial intelligence investments are only getting bigger.

Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon each lifted their guidance for capital expenditures and now collectively expect that number to reach more than $380 billion this year.

Microsoft’s forecast was for fiscal 2026, which ends in June.

The companies are racing to build out infrastructure for what they say is virtually limitless demand for AI services.

Meanwhile, a growing number of skeptics are voicing concerns that these historic spending levels are fueling a bubble, and they’re questioning whether there’s sufficient energy and resources to ever turn lofty AI promises into reality.

As big as the spending projections were this week, they look pedestrian when compared with OpenAI, which has announced roughly $1 trillion worth of infrastructure deals of late with partners including Nvidia, Oracle and Broadcom.

Investor reactions to the megacap reports were mixed.

Amazon saw its stock soar after the company beat on earnings and revenue, and said capex this year will be about $125 billion, up from a prior forecast of $118 billion.

“We’ll continue to make significant investments, especially in AI,” finance chief Brian Olsavsky said on the earnings call, adding that the number will grow in 2026. “We believe it to be a massive opportunity with the potential for strong returns on invested capital over the long term.”

Investors also cheered Alphabet, which reported an earnings beat and boosted its capex forecast for this year to between $91 billion and $93 billion from a prior range of $75 billion to $85 billion. The stock rose 2.5% on Thursday.

But Microsoft shares fell about 3% even though the software company’s results exceeded estimates.

CFO Amy Hood said on the earnings call that capex growth would accelerate in fiscal 2026, which started in July, after the company had previously said growth would slow. Capex rose 45% to $64.55 billion last fiscal year, suggesting a minimum of about $94 billion in 2026. That number is significantly higher when including leases.

Meta’s stock was hit harder, plummeting 11% on Thursday, its steepest drop in three years, despite an across-the-board beat. The company narrowed its capex guidance to between $70 billion and $72 billion, from a prior range of $66 billion to $72 billion.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced in June the creation of the company’s Superintelligence Labs, and said it would be led by some of his company’s costly high-profile hires, including Scale AI ex-CEO Alexandr Wang and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman.

The lab would house the company’s various teams working on foundation models, Zuckerberg wrote in a memo at the time.

“I’m optimistic that this new influx of talent and parallel approach to model development will set us up to deliver on the promise of personal superintelligence for everyone,” Zuckerberg wrote.

But the Oppenheimer analysts said it’s an approach that “mirrors” the company’s metaverse spending in 2021 and 2022, when Zuckerberg was declaring that platform to be the future of computing.

Meta is still burning billions of dollars a quarter on its investments in augmented reality. The company said in its earnings report that its Reality Labs unit lost $4.4 billion in the quarter on $470 million in revenue.

Within cloud computing, Amazon Web Services is still bigger than Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud, but it’s growing more slowly than its rivals.

AWS reported revenue growth in the third quarter of 20% to $33 billion. Microsoft said Azure revenue increased by 40%, while Google’s cloud sales rose 34% to $15.15 billion.

Analysts at Cantor said that clouds with “expansive service stacks like Microsoft” are in a position to benefit from this “heightened phase of AI infrastructure build out.”

They recommend buying the stock, but see reasons to be worried about the spending forecast. The analysts said that total capex, which includes capital leases, is poised to reach $140 billion this year, up 58% from a year earlier and triple the figure from 2024.

That number “is reflective of strong demand on the positive side, but remains a concern as there appears no end in sight,” the analysts wrote.

WATCH: Meta capex doesn’t necessarily result in ROI