How is CEO Andy Jassy Leading Amazon’s AI Investments?

Amazon has released its third quarter earnings, showing growth across the board, especially in its cloud business that grew faster than expected.

Andy Jassy, President and CEO of Amazon, has led the company to an increase of 13% in net sales to US$180.2bn, compared with US$158.9bn in the third quarter of 2024.

Amazon also reports earnings per share (EPS) of US$1.95 on revenue of US$180.2bn, with North America sales increasing by 11% year-over-year and its international segment by 14% year-over-year.

Discussing Amazon’s successes, Andy said: “We continue to see strong momentum and growth across Amazon as AI drives meaningful improvements in every corner of our business.

“AWS is growing at a pace we haven’t seen since 2022, re-accelerating to 20.2% year-on-year.

“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.”

The results come a day after rivals Microsoft and Google announced their own results, with both companies saying they’ll spend more on AI and data centres going forward.

Growing AI successes in 2025

In December 2024, Amazon announced Trainium2, a chip for training AI intelligence models. It said that the chip is fully subscribed as of Q3, acknowledging it as a multi-billion-dollar business that has grown 150% quarter over quarter.

The company launched Project Rainier on 29 October, a massive AI compute cluster containing nearly 500,000 Trainium2 chips to build and deploy Anthropic’s Claude AI models.

During the launch, Amazon said that the AI startup signed up to use one million of the custom chips, a goal the company aims to reach by the end of 2025.

In another partnership, Amazon announced EC2 P6e-GB200 UltraServers using NVIDIA Grace Blackwell Superchips, in July, which contributes to its gains.

The UltraServers are “designed for training and deploying the largest, most sophisticated AI models”, says Amazon.

Grew Connect, an AI solution that enables contact centres to provide consistent, personalised customer experiences, grew in Q3 to a US$1bn annualised revenue rate business in recent weeks, according to the tech company.

Other intelligence areas highlighted by Amazon in its Q3 results are AI feature ‘Help Me Decide’, AI agent Transform, and Alexa+, which customers are using in multiple areas four times more than the original.

The price of AI

Amazon confirmed plans on 29 October to cut around 14,000 roles across its corporate division, a decision influenced by its greater focus on opportunities in AI.

According to the BBC, Amazon’s Senior Vice President Beth Galetti said in a note to employees: “We’re convicted that we need to be organised more leanly, with fewer layers and more ownership, to move quickly as possible for our customers and business.”

While the cuts will affect roughly 4% of Amazon’s corporate workforce, leadership has framed the move not as retrenchment but as reinvention.

Beth told staff in the note that changes would make Amazon “even stronger” by allowing it to “shift resources to ensure we’re investing in our biggest bets and what matters most to our customers’ current and future needs”.

Andy said, according to the BBC: “We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs.”

But analysts say these cuts reflect a broader industry shift. Ben Barringer, technology analyst at Quilter Cheviot, told the BBC that as AI tools are advancing “job losses are inevitable”.

Future success at Amazon 

For the fourth quarter of 2025, Amazon expects net sales of between US$26bn and US$213bn, its operating income is expected to be between US$21bn and US$26bn, compared with US$21.2bn in Q4 2024.

Discussing other areas of Amazon products, Andy says: “In stores, we continue to realise the benefits of innovating in our fulfilment network and we’re on track to deliver to Prime members at the fastest speeds ever again this year, and expand same-day delivery of perishable groceries to over 2,300 communities with access to Amazon’s Same-Day and Next-Day Delivery.”