Amazon has reported over $180 billion in turnover for the third quarter, fuelled by a 20% increase in cloud-computing earnings that exceeded market expectations.
The announcement saw Amazon’s stock rise by more than 9% in after-hours trading on Wall Street.
Quarterly turnover grew 13% year-on-year, surpassing analysts’ forecasts of $178 billion.
The company recorded a net profit of $21.2 billion for the quarter, bolstered by a $9.5 billion pre-tax accounting gain from its investment in AI startup Anthropic, the creator of the Claude model.
According to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, artificial intelligence is driving significant progress across all areas of the company’s operations.
Investors were particularly focused on Amazon’s cloud infrastructure performance, a key area in the global competition for AI dominance, after several quarters of slower growth had raised concerns.
Amazon Web Services (AWS), the world’s leading cloud computing subsidiary, posted a quarterly turnover of $33 billion- a 20% increase year on year - despite experiencing a major global outage last week.
Earlier this week, Amazon announced cost-cutting measures, including the elimination of 14,000 office-based jobs, with reports suggesting a further reduction could bring this figure to 30,000 by January.
That would represent around 10% of the 350,000 employees in strategic and support roles such as human resources and advertising.
The company currently employs over 1.5 million workers worldwide, including a substantial workforce in increasingly automated warehouses, making it the second-largest employer in the United States.
