Live Blog: Will Amazon (AMZN) Soar After Earnings Tonight?

A Wall Street analyst asked Andy Jassy about DeepSeek’s implications and Jassy largely said they believed cost-efficiency improvements would only lead to more spending in AI.

So if you’re an investor wondering whether DeepSeek would reduce Amazon’s spending plans on AI, the answer is they don’t see that happening currently.

We’ll continue updating this live blog if any material information breaks, but it appears Amazon has settled into a 4% to 5% drop after earnings and it’s unlikely there will be any more information that materially moves the stock. 

We thank you for following 24/7 Wall St.’s live blog of Amazon. Make sure to come back tomorrow as we’ll have more analysis on Amazon and provide more commentary and news on Wall Street’s reactions.

A Wall Street analyst just tried asking the company to further clarify their capital expenditures number and CEO Andy Jassy repeated the company will move forward at their current run rate, which is $26.3 billion.

That implies about $105 billion in capital expenditures this year. Andy Jassy went on to call AI ‘the biggest technology shift and business opportunity since the Internet.’

That number may be ‘spooking’ Wall Street a bit as its above their recent expectations. However, its good news for companies in the ‘AI infrastructure trade’ like NVIDIA.

Jassy also discussed whether the company is seeing growth rates constrained in AI, and said while Amazon is growing at triple-digit rates, they would be growing faster in AI if they had sufficient chip and server capacity.

Following a couple of recent disclosures, Amazon shares are now trading down by 5.4% after-hours. Its unclear if this is in reaction to Amazon’s capital expenditure plan for 2025 or other factors.

Amazon just said capital expenditures were $26.4 billion and that run rate will follow through to 2025. If I’m understanding the company properly, that would imply capital expenditures of $104 billion in 2025. That’s above Wall Street expectations.

Amazon shares nearly rebounded to gains at around 4:30, but have trended down since. While Amazon hasn’t provided any material information so far on their conference call, shares are now down about 4.5%, which is the level shares dropped to immediately after Amazon issued their earnings press release.

Amazon is mostly summarizing information that was provided in their earnings release so far, but it’s worth noting that the company is spending time promoting Trainium2, their custom AI accelerator chip which has design support from Marvell (Nasdaq: MRVL).

Marvell’s stock immediately jumped on the added promotion and is now up more than 3% after-hours.

One of the most closely watched numbers in all of finance right now is the capital expenditures from large ‘hyperscalers’ like Amazon.

The company grew capital expenditures 91% last quarter. At face value, that should be great news for companies in the ‘AI infrastructure trade.’ For example, Marvell (Nasdaq: MRVL) jumped 2% immediately following Apple’s earnings release.

However, the big number that will impact not only Amazon’s share price tomorrow but also companies like NVIDIA (Nasdaq: AMZN), is what forecast will be given for future capital expenditure spend on the company’s conference call tonight.

Amazon’s conference call starts in 5 minutes. Refresh this page periodically if you want the most important takeaways as we’ll be listening to the call live. 

Amazon shares are bouncing around. Shortly after the company’s earnings release, shares dropped below $230. Then shares recovered to above where the stock closed yesterday. As of 4:40 p.m. ET, they’re down about 2%.

It’s likely that Amazon’s performance tomorrow will be driven by commentary on the company’s conference call. The conference call starts at 5 p.m. and we’ll listen in and post highlights.

How are other stocks that just released earnings performing? Let’s take a quick look:

• Cloudflare (NYSE: NET): Up 5.3% as of 4:27 p.m. ET. Outlook for the year largely matched expectations, but EPS projections were better than expected.
• Monolithic Power Systems (Nasdaq: MPWR): Likely the big winner today, with shares up 17% after hours. The company has been under significant pressure in recent months over fears it was losing market share, but tonight’s earnings easily surpassed expectations.
• Fortinet (Nasdaq: FTNT): Another big winner with shares up 11%. Both earnings and revenue beat.

Amazon is now down just .3%.

Amazon’s losses are moderating after initially falling 1.5%.

Next quarter’s sales miss will drive initial share price movements. On one hand, Amazon’s guidance for the first quarter is a sizable miss. A midpoint of $153.25 billion in sales projects to just 5% to 9% sales growth. 

Yet, there are some caveats that make analysis around this number not so straightforward. For one, Amazon is forecasting significant foreign currency headwinds. In constant currency, they expect sales next quarter to be $155.1 billion.

Second, last year was a Leap Year, which makes quarterly comps a bit more challenging as well.

Not all of Amazon’s revenue is created equally, and Wall Street is more focused on results in AWS and advertising (both very high-margin businesses). If the majority of the revenue miss comes from areas like international sales – which is a weaker part of Amazon’s business with lower margins – we could see the sell-off in Amazon’s shares continue to moderate.

Amazon is now down 4% following its earnings release. Let’s take an inventory of the positives and negatives.

Positives:

• EPS Growth Last Quarter: EPS of $1.86 handily topped Wall Street expectations of $1.49. Wall Street is watching to see how ‘efficient’ Amazon will be in the years to come, so this is definitely a good sign.
• Net Income: Obviously, this number drives EPS, but its worth noting that Amazon’s total net income of $20 billion was up 89% from the prior year. Free cash flow hit $38.2 billion
• Worth noting: Amazon’s CEO calling out innovation in areas like their Trainium2 chip. A continued emphasis on Amazon’s custom chips could be a major boon to supplier Marvell (Nasdaq: MRVL)

Neutral:

• AWS Growth: AWS growth came in right in line with Wall Street estimates. It’s hard to see whether Wall Street sees this as a positive or negative since both Microsoft and Google delivered largely disappointing cloud results.

Negative:

• Revenue Guidance: Amazon’s revenue guide for next quarter comes in at $153.25 billion at the midpoint, that’s a good bit below Wall Street’s expectations of $158.5 billion in revenue.

We are pouring through Amazon’s earnings release to mine the biggest takeaways.

• AWS Growth: Comes in at 19%. This is even with last quarter’s growth rate, but could be considered a positive as both Google and Microsoft reported decelerating cloud growth last quarter.
• AWS Operating Income: $10.6 billion, which is a 47% growth rate from last year.

Amazon just released earnings and the EPS for the fourth-quarter crushed expectations.

• EPS of $1.86 versus expectation of $1.49
• Revenue of $187.8 billion versus expectations of $187.3 billion

However, forward guidance for Q1 revenue is light. The guidance is weighing on the stock’s performance immediately following the release. Shares are down 3%

Keep updating this blog periodically as we dig through the numbers. 

Markets have closed for the day and Amazon had a small rally into the close. We now await the release of the company’s fourth quarter earnings. We’ll post immediate reactions and continue following reactions from Wall Street across the next hour.

While we await Amazon’s numbers, make sure to grab a free copy of our “The Next NVIDIA” report. 

The report first called Palantir early last year, before shares more than tripled, and also contains a detailed report on the number one rival to NVIDIA that recently saw its shares surge more than 40% in two days after reporting earnings.

Its complementary and available for a limited time. The report features 38 pages of in-depth analysis. If you’re interested in AI at all, you’ll want to grab a copy before it’s gone.

Amazon’s earnings will be out after the bell, here are the key areas we’ll be watching:

• AWS Growth: Both Google and Microsoft produced lower cloud growth relative to expectations, what will Amazon announce?
• Capex Guidance: How much does Amazon plan to spend on AI data centers in 2025? This number could cause a large impact on the stock performance of dozens of ‘ai infrastructure’ stocks
• Advertising Growth: Amazon has been driving profitability growth from its advertising unit, what percentage growth will they report.
• Profitability Growth vs. Sales Growth: Will Amazon keep getting leaner in 2025? Wall Street expects earnings growth of 11% next year and profitability growth of more than 20%. What will Amazon’s guidance imply about continuing efforts to trim expenses?

While this live blog will be focusing on Amazon, there are some other earnings to watch tonight:

• Cloudflare (NYSE: NET) will be reporting tonight. We recently added the company to our AI Investor Portfolio as a top play for the rise of AI agents in 2025. We’ll be closely watching results.
• Fortinet (Nasdaq: FTNT) will provide more insight into demand in the security space when they report this afternoon.
• Monolithic Power Systems (Nasdaq: MPWR) also reports this afternoon. The company rose as the AI boom fueled demand for its power systems, but its shares recently fell after reports it was being replaced in some of NVIDIA’s next-generation Blackwell systems.

If you’re interested in the AI space, make sure to check out our AI Investor Podcast. We invest a $500,000 portfolio of our top AI views in public and last week added a major position in Amazon. We’ll cover the company’s earnings in our next podcast, so make sure to subscribe and get our fully analysis!