Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon, speaks at the ceremonial ribbon cutting prior to tomorrow’s opening night for the NHL’s newest hockey franchise the Seattle Kraken at the Climate Pledge Arena on October 22, 2021, in Seattle.
Bruce Bennett | Getty Images Sport | Getty Images
Amazon is scheduled to report first-quarter earnings after market close Thursday.
Here’s what Wall Street is expecting:
Earnings: 21 cents per share, according to analysts surveyed by Refinitiv
Revenue: $124.5 billion, according to analysts surveyed by Refinitiv
Here’s how other key Amazon segments are expected to report:
Amazon Web Services: $21.22 billion, according to StreetAccount
Advertising: $9.08 billion, according to StreetAccount
Amazon’s report will round out a busy week of earnings for the mega-cap tech companies. Meta on Wednesday posted its first sales increase in four quarters. On Tuesday, Microsoft beat analysts’ expectations, while Alphabet topped estimates and said its cloud business turned profitable. Apple is scheduled to report fiscal second-quarter results on May 4.
The key focus for Amazon will be on its cloud computing division, which is facing slowing growth as businesses trim their cloud spending amid a challenging economic environment. Last quarter, Amazon Web Services missed estimates, growing 20% in the period, down from 27.5% in the third quarter.
“On the Q4 earnings call, management stated that AWS grew mid-teens [year-over-year] in January, which represents a further deceleration from the 20% growth in 4Q22,” Jefferies analysts, who maintain a buy rating on Amazon shares, wrote in a note to clients Tuesday. They said AWS growth is likely to come in at 13% in the first quarter.
CEO Andy Jassy has been aggressively cutting costs in an effort to bolster profitability. The company is in the middle of layoffs that are expected to lead to 9,000 job cuts across Amazon’s AWS, advertising, human resources, video games and Twitch livestreaming units. Combined with the 18,000 people it let go in recent months, the cuts amount to the biggest downsizing in Amazon’s 29-year history.
Jassy has been winding down some of Amazon’s more unproven bets and slowing warehouse expansion. On Wednesday, Amazon announced it would stop selling its line of Halo health and fitness devices and disband the team working on the effort, which resulted in some layoffs.
Amazon is also contending with decelerating growth in its core retail segment. The Covid pandemic-fueled e-commerce boom has fizzled as consumers have increasingly returned to physical stores. Shoppers have also been more cautious with their discretionary spending amid rising food and gas prices.
Jassy told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” earlier this month that Amazon has observed consumers being more careful about their spending, and trading down to more affordable products when making purchases.
Even amid the cost cuts, Jassy said Amazon is investing in areas like grocery, health care, its Kuiper internet satellite service and generative artificial intelligence. AWS recently jumped into the generative AI race with the launch of Bedrock, a service that lets developers use large language models developed by Amazon and others to create their own tools.
OpenAI’s short-form artificial intelligence video app Sora hit 1 million downloads less than five days after its launch in late September, according to an executive.
Bill Peebles, head of Sora at OpenAI, shared the milestone in a post on X late Wednesday. He said Sora reached 1 million downloads even faster than ChatGPT, the company’s popular AI chatbot that supports 800 million weekly active users.
Sora allows users to generate short videos for free by typing in a prompt. The app is only available on iOS devices and is invite-based, which means people need a code to access it. Despite these restrictions, Sora has climbed to the No. 1 spot in Apple’s App Store.
“Team [is] working hard to keep up with surging growth,” Peebles wrote.
Sora’s launch has also sparked intense backlash, namely around whether the app infringes on copyrights. CNBC viewed videos on the platform that included characters from shows like “SpongeBob SquarePants,” “Rick and Morty” and “South Park,” and was able to generate many characters independently.
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The Motion Picture Association, which advocates on behalf of the television, motion picture and home video industries, said in a statement Monday that “videos that infringe our members’ films, shows, and characters have proliferated on OpenAI’s service.”
“OpenAI needs to take immediate and decisive action to address this issue,” Charles Rivkin, CEO of the MPA said in the statement. “Well-established copyright law safeguards the rights of creators and applies here.”
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the company will soon give rights holders more granular control over character generation, according to a blog post last week.
During a briefing with reporters at the company’s DevDay event on Monday, Altman said some users have complained that Sora is too restrictive. He asked for patience as the company irons out best practices.
“Please give us some grace,” Altman said. “The rate of change will be high.”
An Intel manufacturing technician holds an Intel Core Ultra series 3 processor (code-named Panther Lake) built on Intel 18A, inside Intel’s new Fab 52 in Chandler, Arizona, in September 2025.
Courtesy: Intel
Intel on Thursday announced its new PC chips slated to debut in laptops next year as the chipmaker battles to turn around its struggling business.
The company said the new Panther Lake processor is made with its 18A technology and is the most advanced node made on U.S. soil.
The new generation of chips will be made at Intel’s Fab 52 facility in Arizona, which the company said is now fully operational and set to ramp production.
“The United States has always been home to Intel’s most advanced R&D, product design and manufacturing – and we are proud to build on this legacy as we expand our domestic operations and bring new innovations to the market,” CEO Lip-Bu Tan said in a release announcing the news.
Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan holds a wafer of CPU tiles for the Intel Core Ultra series 3, code-named Panther Lake, outside the Intel Ocotillo campus in Chandler, Arizona. Panther Lake is the first client system-on-chips (SoCs) built on the Intel 18A process node.
Courtesy: Intel
Intel’s latest reveal comes during a critical stretch for the beleaguered chipmaker that has lagged in recent years and struggled to keep up with cutting-edge chip demands spurred by the artificial intelligence revolution.
Thomas Kurian CEO of Google Cloud, speaks at the Google Cloud Next conference in Las Vegas on April 8, 2025.
Candice Ward | Google Cloud | Getty Images
Google is taking another shot at selling businesses on artificial intelligence agents by introducing subscriptions featuring agents that perform specific work tasks.
Gemini Enterprise targets large organizations, starting at a monthly fee of $30 per person. Gemini Business, for smaller clients, costs $21 per person each month. The offerings enable corporate workers to build agents that draw on data from Box, Microsoft and Salesforce products.
Premade Google agents for software development, data science and customer engagement also come with the new Gemini subscriptions, along with access to agents from Workday and other companies. They include the capabilities of Agentspace, an agent building product Google announced in December. Google will upgrade current Agentspace clients to Gemini Enterprise or Gemini Business free of charge through the course of their contracts, a spokesperson said.
Gemini subscriptions come with Model Armor, a feature for inspecting and blocking requests and responses in AI chats, so organizations don’t need to fuss with setting it up.
The launch comes three days after OpenAI showed how people can access tools from third-party apps in ChatGPT. Google and Microsoft, meanwhile, are looking to get enterprises hooked on agents that take care of some processes, so employees can do other things. Both companies sell services aimed at developers and at nontechnical workers. Neither Gemini Enterprise nor Gemini Business require coding.
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“We’ve seen people from consulting services companies, telecommunications companies, software companies, hospitality companies and a variety of different manufacturing companies all using these, and in a variety of scenarios,” said Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google’s cloud group, in a media briefing.
Kurian, who accelerated the unit’s year-over-year revenue growth back above 30% in the second quarter, named cruise line Virgin Voyages as a Gemini Enterprise early adopter.
Firms are more likely to be exploring or testing AI agents than putting them into production, said Chirag Dekate, an analyst at technology industry researcher Gartner. But Google’s handling of security and governance should ease concerns among big companies evaluating agent systems, Dekate said.
Google’s new Gemini subscriptions depend on the company’s Gemini AI models for working with text, images and videos. Google and other model makers regularly release new versions, and enterprises want to avoid getting stuck with lagging models when selecting agent software, Dekate said.
“How Google is able to leverage this unified messaging in the Gemini 3.0 launch sequence, which is coming soon, I think, will also be a crucial litmus test,” he said. “In other words, will they be able to offer a same-day sort of innovation cycle, or is this going to be staggered in terms of adoption patterns?”