Amazon Q3 revenue was up 13 percent to $180.2 billion in the third quarter, compared with $158.9 billion in 2024. The AWS group that includes AI saw sales increase 20 percent year-over-year to $33 billion. The company reported that gross profit increased 38 percent to $21.2 billion for the quarter, due largely to consumer spending online and the demand for cloud computing. Amazon is the dominant player in the cloud space with about 30 percent of global share. However, investors have been cautious about AWS, which accounted for 65 percent of the company’s total operating income in Q3. Since 2022, competition has heated up with OpenAI’s ChatGPT signing on with Microsoft Azure.

“The strong quarter, which beat analysts’ expectations, sent Amazon’s stock soaring more than 10 percent in after-hours trading,” writes The New York Times.

Operating income was flat at $17.4 billion for the quarter, which included two special charges — a $2.5 billion civil settlement the Federal Trade Commission called “historic” and $1.8 billion in estimated severance costs related to planned role eliminations. In October, the company announced it was eliminating 14,000 corporate jobs. Absent those charges, operating income would have been up 22 percent to $21.7 billion.

“We continue to see strong momentum and growth across Amazon as AI drives meaningful improvements in every corner of our business,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said in an earnings release, underscoring that AWS “is growing at a pace we haven’t seen since 2022.” That’s due in part to more than 3.8 gigawatts of compute power added in the past 12 months, “more than any other cloud provider.”

John Dinsdale, research director of Synergy Research Group, says “Amazon ‘has done remarkably well’ given how competitors have aggressively pursued its lead,” in the cloud computing space, per NYT, which says AWS’s Q3 performance is seen as something of a turnaround.

“In one sense, AWS’s slower growth simply reflects that big increases are harder the larger you are,” The Wall Street Journal observes, pointing out that AWS’s revenue in the most recent quarter was “well above the $23 billion or so analysts estimate for the second-largest player — Microsoft’s Azure.”

On the earnings call, Jassy fielded a question about the recent layoffs “and backtracked on AI innovations being the primary driver for the cuts,” Variety reports, quoting the executive saying the curtailment was related to “culture.”

“As a leadership team, we are committed to operating like the world’s largest startup. That means removing layers,” Variety quotes Jassy saying.

Meanwhile, Amazon’s legacy ops remain robust. “The number of items that Amazon sold in the quarter grew 11 percent,” reports NYT, adding that its advertising business “remained strong, with $17.7 billion in sales.”

Related:
How Amazon’s Cloud and AI Investments in APEC Contribute to U.S. GDP Growth, Amazon, 10/28/25
Amazon Subsidiary to Invest $5 Billion in South Korea, Presidential Office Says, Reuters, 10/28/25
Amazon Says It Didn’t Cut 14,000 People Because of Money. It Cut Them Because of Culture, CNN, 10/30/25