(Nathan Stirk/Getty Images)

Amazon shares drop after soft revenue forecast, but cloud grows

CEO Andy Jassy told analysts that “consumers are being careful on prices.”

8/1/24 6:42PM

Amazon shares took a hit Thursday after hours, dropping 7.6% after the company reported a slight revenue miss and gave sales guidance that was weaker than analysts were expecting.

If that stock decline holds during regular trading Friday, it would knock roughly $130 billion off Amazon’s market cap. The revenue miss was largely a result of sluggish growth in Amazon’s core retail business, which faces competition from Chinese e-commerce companies sending cheaper goods to North American consumers.

“Consumers are being careful on prices,” CEO Andy Jassy said during the earnings call. That led to lower average selling prices, which weighed on sales. The growth rate of units sold in North America outpaced that of sales, meaning a selection of cheaper goods were appealing to consumers.

Meanwhile, Amazon’s big spending on data centers and AI seems to be bearing fruit. Amazon Web Services sales increased 19% year-over-year to $26.3 billion, and the segment generated an operating profit of $9.3 billion, up from $5.4 billion a year earlier.

That helped Amazon to an overall profit of $13.5 billion in the quarter, up from $6.7 billion a year earlier.

Amazon said that customers are bringing both generative AI and non-AI workloads to the cloud.

The strength at AWS it came after Microsoft reported disappointing growth in its Azure cloud-computing business earlier this week. Like other tech companies this season, Amazon had to assure investors it isn’t over investing in AI.

“The reality right now is that while we are investing a significant amount in the AI space and in infrastructure, we would like to have more capacity than we already have today,” Jassy said. “We have a lot of demand right now, and I think it's going to be a very, very large business for us.”

Rani Molla

Tunnel Vision

9/12/25

Tesla gets permit to test autonomous cars in Nevada as autonomous driving heats up there

Amazon’s self-driving Zoox launched service this week, and Google’s Waymo is testing there.

Las Vegas Exteriors And Landmarks - 2024

Jon Keegan

9/11/25

OpenAI and Microsoft reach agreement that moves OpenAI closer to for-profit status

In a joint statement, OpenAI and Microsoft announced a “non-binding memorandum of understanding” for their renegotiated $13 billion partnership, which was a source of recent tension between the two companies.

Settling the agreement is a requirement to clear the way for OpenAI to convert to a for-profit public benefit corporation, which it must do before a year-end deadline to secure a $20 billion investment from SoftBank.

OpenAI also announced that the controlling nonprofit arm would hold an equity stake in the PBC valued at $100 billion, which would make it “one of the most well-resourced philanthropic organizations in the world.”

The statement read:

“This recapitalization would also enable us to raise the capital required to accomplish our mission — and ensure that as OpenAI’s PBC grows, so will the nonprofit’s resources, allowing us to bring it to historic levels of community impact.”

A joint statement from OpenAI and Microsoft

The statement read:

“This recapitalization would also enable us to raise the capital required to accomplish our mission — and ensure that as OpenAI’s PBC grows, so will the nonprofit’s resources, allowing us to bring it to historic levels of community impact.”

Rani Molla

9/11/25

BofA doesn’t expect Tesla’s ride-share service to have an impact on Uber or Lyft this year

Analysts at Bank of America Global Research compared Tesla’s new Bay Area ride-sharing service with its rivals and found that, for now, it’s not much competition for Uber and Lyft. “Tesla scale in SF is still small, and we don’t expect impact on Uber/Lyft financial performance in ’25,” they wrote.

Tesla is operating an unknown number of cars with drivers using supervised full self-driving in the Bay Area, and roughly 30 autonomous robotaxis in Austin. The company has allowed the public to download its Robotaxi app and join a waitlist, but it hasn’t said how many people have been let in off that waitlist.

While the analysts found that Tesla ride-shares are cheaper than traditional ride-share services like Uber and Lyft, the wait times are a lot longer (nine-minute wait times on average, when cars were available at all) and the process has more friction. They also said the “nature of [a] Tesla FSD ‘driver’ is slightly more aggressive than a Waymo,” the Google-owned company that’s currently operating 800 vehicles in the Bay Area.

Apple AI was MIA at iPhone event

A year and a half into a bungled rollout of AI into Apple’s products, Apple Intelligence was barely mentioned at the “Awe Dropping” event.

Jon Keegan9/10/25

Jon Keegan

9/10/25

Oracle’s massive sales backlog is thanks to a $300 billion deal with OpenAI, WSJ reports

OpenAI has signed a massive deal to purchase $300 billion worth of cloud computing capacity from Oracle, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.

The report notes that the five-year deal would be one of the largest cloud computing contracts ever signed, requiring 4.5 gigawatts of capacity.

The news is prompting shares to pare some of their massive gains, presumably because of concerns about counterparty and concentration risk.

Yesterday, Oracle shares skyrocketed as much as 30% in after-hours trading after the company forecast that it expects its cloud infrastructure business to see revenues climb to $144 billion by 2030.

Oracle shares were up as much as 43% on Wednesday.

It’s the second example in under a week of how much OpenAI’s cash burn and fundraising efforts are playing a starring role in the AI boom: the Financial Times reported that OpenAI is also the major new Broadcom customer that has placed $10 billion in orders.

Exclusive | Oracle, OpenAI Sign Massive $300 Billion Cloud Computing Deal