(Noah Berger/Getty Images)

Amazon pulled off its monster quarter despite being left out of OpenAI’s tangle of deals

Amazon’s AWS revenue grew 20% year on year, and will hit $125 billion in capex for the year. CEO Andy Jassy said the 14,000 jobs cut weren’t about money, but about “culture.”

Jon Keegan

10/31/25 11:24AM

Amazon may not be found in the tangled web of massive deals that are passing billions between OpenAI, Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices, SoftBank, and Oracle, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t making bank from the AI race.

Last night, Amazon reported strong third-quarter earnings, beating Wall Street’s expectations on earnings and revenue. Shares were up over 10% in early trading this morning, and the stock opened at a record high of $250.10.

All eyes were on Amazon’s AWS cloud computing unit, which saw revenues grow 20% year on year, ringing up $33 billion in sales, just above analyst estimates. Demand for AWS computing was huge, and a backlog of contracted business is piling up.

On the earnings call, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said:

“Backlog grew to $200 billion by Q3 quarter end, and doesn’t include several unannounced new deals in October, which together are more than our total deal volume for all of Q3. AWS is gaining momentum.”

It’s not clear what those unannounced deals are, but that is a significant amount of demand. This isn’t just an Amazon problem — Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said they also had a huge backlog, but theirs was $392 billion.

The answer to this problem of course is spending buckets of capital expenditure dollars to scale up to meet demand. Amazon spent $35.1 billion on capex last quarter, and said the total for the full year is $125 billion. And next year, management expects it to be bigger than that.

Jassy was asked to talk about the massive layoffs Amazon just announced, cutting 14,000 corporate roles (with a reported 30,000 planned company-wide). Why did the company have to cut so deep when the money is rolling in? It’s not about the money, said Jassy:

“The announcement that we made a few days ago was not really financially driven, and it’s not even really AI driven — not right now, at least. It really, it’s culture. And if you grow as fast as we did for several years, the size of businesses, the number of people, the number of locations, the types of businesses you’re in, you end up with a lot more people than what you had before, and you end up with a lot more layers.”

Jassy explained that all that built-up headcount was slowing management decisions down, and that the company is “committed to operating like the world’s largest startup.”

Update (Friday 11:45 a.m.): Corrected opening price for Amazon.

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SpaceX went public on June 12 at a $2.2 trillion valuation, the largest debut in history. While the company hasn’t yet posted a profit, it seems to have convinced Wall Street that it will get there and grow its valuation on the way.

Of the at least 17 analysts that gave a rating on Tuesday, all but one gave it a “buy” or “outperform” rating. MoffettNathanson was "neutral."

The ratings come as SpaceX joined the Nasdaq 100 index, a benchmark tech-heavy basket of companies that underpins millions of portfolios. The inclusion adds built-in demand for the stock from index funds and ETFs.

Still, SpaceX fell more than 5% on Tuesday amid a broader sell-off, and is currently effectively flat from its opening price of $150 a share.

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Nike sinks to lowest level since 2014 after warning of “challenged” sales environment in Q4 report

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Investors had a mixed reaction after the global sports apparel company reported its fourth quarter earnings on Tuesday after the bell. Shares initially rose 5% as Nike beat out Wall Street expectations amid a hefty tariff refund bonus. However, the stock then sank to its lowest level since August 2014 in postmarket trading.

Here are the Q4 numbers:

Revenue of $11.0 billion (estimate: $10.8 billion).
Adjusted earnings per share of $0.20 (estimate: $0.12).

Ahead of this report, Nike warned that results would be flattered by a one-time tariff refund (now estimated at roughly $0.52 per share for the bottom line). That gave the company an extra cushion in snapping its streak of seven quarters of year-over-year profit declines.

Over the past year, the company had been punished by tariffs on imported goods, stagnant consumer spending, and increasing competition from other footwear brands like New Balance, Adidas, and Hoka.

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Amazon pulled off its monster quarter despite being left out of OpenAI’s tangle of deals

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