Amazon is investing heavily in A.I. through products and partnerships.
Amazon (AMZN) CEO Andy Jassy. " width="970" height="636" data-caption='Amazon CEO Andy Jassy. <span class="lazyload media-credit">Jerod Harris/Getty Images for Vox Media</span>'>
Amazon’s first quarterly earnings of 2024 are out. The retail and tech giant yesterday (April 30) reported $143.3 billion in revenue for the three months ended March, up 13 percent from the same period last year and beating Wall Street expectations. Operating profit grew even faster, more than doubling to $15.3 billion, suggesting CEO Andy Jassy’s cost-cutting measures are working. Artificial intelligence led the show during a call with analysts, where Amazon leaders said “A.I.” a total of 30 times. Amazon shares jumped around 5 percent to $178 in yesterday’s after-hour trading, continuing its rally since the beginning of the year.
On the earnings call, Jassy highlighted how, with the help of A.I., Amazon.com sellers are now able to generate comprehensive product pages on the site by simply submitting website URLs. Customers of Amazon’s cloud service, AWS, are also using A.I. to revitalize sales within their business streams, while Amazon Bedrock offers customers a wide array of A.I. models. Bedrock, launched last fall, is an AWS application that allows business clients to create customized deep-learning neural networks trained on their own data.
“We see considerable momentum on the A.I. front where we’ve accumulated a multibillion-dollar revenue run rate already,” Jassy said on yesterday’s earnings call. In the first quarter, AWS revenue increased 17 percent from a year ago to $25 billion, while advertising brought in $11.8 billion.
In the earnings report, Amazon also touted how companies are leveraging Amazon Sagemaker, a machine learning service, and Amazon OpenSearch, an analytics monitoring platform, to create customized A.I. chatbots. The company also teased Zoox, a self-driving robotaxi service expected to launch later this year. Perhaps most notably, Amazon announced its extended collaboration with A.I. chip giant Nvidia (NVDA) and said it aims to make AWS the “best place to run Nvidia GPUs, helping customers unlock new generative A.I. capabilities.”
Outside the company, Amazon in the first quarter upped its stake in A.I. startup Anthropic to $4 billion. Anthropic labeled itself as a “public-benefit” company looking to research the properties of A.I. to deploy safe models for public use.
Still, given Amazon’s expansions into leveraging A.I., Jassy noted the company is in “relatively early days in generative A.I.,” adding that “we see sizable opportunity for growth.” Amazon plans to “meaningfully increase” its yearly capital spending in expanding A.I. infrastructure and capabilities.
Amazon’s impressive earnings were also bolstered by expansions in the Prime Video library and increased retail sales domestically and abroad. In the first quarter, Amazon’s MGM Studios released 20 movies and shows that attracted tens of millions of watchers. During the first quarter, the company inked a deal with YouTube superstar MrBeast to produce the largest-in-history game show on Prime Video.
