Amazon Shares Surge After Cloud Growth Speeds Up and Spending Rises

Amazon shares jumped about 11 percent on Friday after Amazon reported third-quarter results that showed its cloud business speeding up. CNBC put the stock’s gain at 10.81 percent.

Revenue came in at $180.17 billion, above the $177.8 billion analysts expected, CNBC reported. Earnings were $1.95 a share against a forecast of $1.57. Amazon Web Services, the cloud unit, brought in $33 billion, up 20 percent from a year earlier and above Wall Street’s expectations. Chief Executive Andy Jassy said growth had reaccelerated to a pace not seen since 2022, as both CNBC and the AP reported.

Advertising revenue grew 24 percent to $17.7 billion, and online store sales rose 10 percent, CNBC reported. Amazon’s operating income was flat from a year earlier at $17.4 billion, held down by roughly $1.8 billion in severance costs and a $2.5 billion settlement with the Federal Trade Commission over how it signed customers up for Prime.

The results came with a larger bill for the artificial-intelligence buildout. Amazon raised its 2025 capital spending forecast to $125 billion from $118 billion, and Chief Financial Officer Brian Olsavsky said the figure will likely rise in 2026, CNBC reported. The company guided to fourth-quarter revenue of $206 billion to $213 billion, a midpoint of about $209.5 billion against analysts’ estimate of $208 billion.

Before the report, the stock had risen only 1.6 percent for the year, well behind other megacap technology companies.

The company also announced this week that it will cut about 14,000 corporate jobs, with more expected. Asked about the reasons, Jassy said the cuts were not “financially driven” or the result of artificial intelligence, “right now, at least,” and described the issue as one of culture, saying rapid growth had added people, locations and layers of management, CNBC reported. Amazon had about 1.58 million employees at the end of the quarter, up 2 percent from a year earlier.

The reaction shows how closely investors are watching returns on the hundreds of billions that technology companies are pouring into data centers. Google, Meta and Microsoft also raised their spending forecasts, CNBC reported.