Amazon (AMZN) reported its third quarter earnings after the bell on Thursday, beating on the top and bottom lines, as its cloud business grew faster than expected.
The results come just a day after rivals Microsoft (MSFT) and Google (GOOG, GOOGL) announced their own results, with both companies saying they’ll spend more on AI data centers going forward. Microsoft stock fell nearly 3% on the day, while Google shares were up 2.5%.
Amazon stock rose more than 9% following the report.
For the quarter, Amazon reported earnings per share (EPS) of $1.95 on revenue of $180.2 billion, better than analysts’ expectations of EPS of $1.58 and revenue of $177.8 billion.
Amazon’s AWS brought in $33.01 billion in revenue, versus an anticipated $32.4 billion.
The company also said adoption of its Trainium2 AI chip is now a multi-billion-dollar business that grew 150% quarter-over-quarter, and that it launched its Project Rainier AI cluster with 500,000 Trainium 2 chips.
Still, Amazon stock is lagging Microsoft’s and Google’s by a wide margin, climbing just 2.4% year-to-date versus Microsoft, which is up 24%, and Google, which has jumped 49%.
Part of that has to do with the perception that AWS simply isn’t capturing as much of the AI market as its biggest rivals.
While Microsoft counts OpenAI (OPAI.PVT) among its most important AI clients and Google has Gemini, Amazon relies on Anthropic for massive AI exposure. And the company splits that with Google, which also provides cloud computing services to Anthropic (ANTH.PVT).
On Wednesday, Amazon said the AI startup signed up to use 1 million custom Amazon chips to train and run its AI models. And while that’s a win for Amazon, Anthropic announced a similar deal with Google just last week.
Read more: Live coverage of corporate earnings
Email Daniel Howley at dhowley@yahoofinance.com. Follow him on X/Twitter at @DanielHowley.
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