Amazon CEO Andy Jassy at AWS re:Invent 2024 (Noah Berger/Getty Images)

Amazon soars as Q3 earnings, sales beat Wall Street expectations

AWS was the star of the show in Amazon’s results on Thursday.

10/30/25 4:07PM

Updated 10/31/25 5:31AM

Amazon shares soared after the company beat Wall Street’s expectations for third-quarter sales and profit, as revenue from its AWS business jumped.

The stock shot up 13% in recent after-hours trading, and has broadly held onto its gains in early trading on Friday.

The company posted $180.2 billion in sales for Q3, growing 13% from the same quarter a year earlier and topping analysts’ expectations of $177.9 billion.

Earnings per share came in at $1.95, blowing past analysts’ estimate of $1.57, as compiled by FactSet.

Amazon’s AWS cloud business saw revenue jump 20% year on year to $33 billion, powered by huge demand for AI. The Street was expecting $32.5 billion. Last week, a major AWS outage disrupted websites and platforms around the world, including Snapchat, Reddit, Roblox, and Venmo.

The company’s capital expenditure — a number that’s been watched closely in recent quarters as tech giants spend vast sums of money to build the infrastructure to power AI — totaled $35.1 billion, blowing past analysts’ forecasts of $31.9 billion and topping second-quarter spending of $32.18 billion.

Amazon gave guidance for fourth-quarter sales between $206 billion and $213 billion, compared with estimates of $208.4 billion. Operating income was forecast at $21 billion to $26 billion, topping Wall Street’s expectation of $19.73 billion.

Some highlights for the quarter:

Amazon added 3.8 gigawatts of computing capacity, an amount the company says is larger than any other cloud provider.
The company opened Project Rainier, its massive AI data center containing 500,000 of its custom Trainium2 chips.
Amazon said Trainium2 is a “fully subscribed” multibillion-dollar business that’s grown 150% since the second quarter.
Advertising revenue was $17.7 billion, up 24% year on year.
Subscription revenue (Amazon Prime, audiobooks, etc.) was up 11% year on year, at $12.6 billion for the quarter.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said:

“AWS is growing at a pace we haven’t seen since 2022, re-accelerating to 20.2% YoY. We continue to see strong demand in AI and core infrastructure, and we’ve been focused on accelerating capacity — adding more than 3.8 gigawatts in the past 12 months.”

On Wednesday, Amazon announced it would reduce its corporate workforce by a net 14,000 employees, after Reuters reported the number of roles reduced company-wide could reach 30,000. The cuts follow a report from The New York Times that reveled internal Amazon documents that show a desire to automate of up to 75% of its operations.

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Oil settles Friday at highest level since start of war

US oil prices moved higher in afternoon trading Friday, sapping strength from the stock market as they posted their highest close since the start of the Iran war.

After another day where the Strait of Hormuz was essentially closed to global tanker traffic, US futures for West Texas Intermediate settled up 3.1% at $98.71 a barrel for an 8.6% weekly gain, per Dow Jones data.

American officials have discussed using the US Navy to escort tankers through the narrow waterway between Iran and Oman, but have said plans for such convoys are not ready yet. However, it is unclear if military convoys would bring an end to the war-related dislocations in the oil market.

“It could help,” Tom Liles, senior vice president of upstream research at energy consulting firm Rystad, told Sherwood News in a recent interview. “It could also go in a lot of different directions if a Navy ship is hit or if a tanker is hit.”

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Memory stocks rebound off last weeks losses

Memory stocks Micron, Sandisk, Western Digital, and Seagate Technology Holdings rose again Friday, putting these crucial providers of chips for AI inference work on track for big weekly gains after last week’s steep losses following the outbreak of war with Iran.

There’s no obvious trigger for the move higher for these shares this week, other than a bit of a recovery in the AI trade more broadly — AI beneficiaries like IT cable and connections maker Amphenol and custom chip and networking company Marvell Technology clawed back some gains this week — perhaps due Oracle’s earnings earlier, and some mean reversion to boot.

Micron is due to report earnings after the close of trading on Wednesday, with the company catching a couple price target hikes this week, including one from Wedbush on Friday.

Sandisk is something of a different story, as its enormous gains over the last 12 months — roughly 1,200% — have made it a momentum play beloved by the retail crowd.

It was up about 20% this week at around 11 a.m. ET. And its nearly 170% gain this year keeps the stock on top of the S&P 500, in terms of price performance.

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