Amazon’s third-quarter profits rose 38% to $21.2 billion, but a big part of the jump had nothing to do with its core businesses of selling goods or cloud services.
The company reported a $9.5 billion pre-tax gain from its investment in the AI startup Anthropic, which was included in Amazon’s non-operating income for the quarter.
The windfall wasn’t the result of a sale or cash transaction, but rather accounting rules. After Anthropic raised new funding in September at a $183 billion valuation, Amazon was required to revalue its equity stake to reflect the higher market price, a process known as a “mark-to-market” adjustment.
To put the $9.5 billion paper gain in perspective, the Amazon Web Services cloud business — historically Amazon’s primary profit engine — generated $11.4 billion in quarterly operating profits.
At the same time, Amazon is spending big on its AI infrastructure buildout for Anthropic and others. The company just opened an $11 billion AI data center complex, dubbed Project Rainier, where Anthropic’s Claude models run on hundreds of thousands of Amazon’s Trainium 2 chips.
Amazon is going head-to-head against Microsoft, which just re-upped its partnership with ChatGPT maker OpenAI; and Google, which reported record cloud revenue for its recent quarter, driven by AI. The AI infrastructure race is fueling a big surge in capital spending for all three cloud giants.
Amazon spent $35.1 billion on property and equipment in the third quarter, up 55% from a year earlier.
Andy Jassy, the Amazon CEO, sought to reassure Wall Street that the big outlay will be worth it.
“You’re going to see us continue to be very aggressive investing in capacity, because we see the demand,” Jassy said on the company’s conference call. “As fast as we’re adding capacity right now, we’re monetizing it. It’s still quite early, and represents an unusual opportunity for customers and AWS.”
The cash for new data centers doesn’t hit the bottom line immediately, but it comes into play as depreciation and amortization costs are recorded on the income statement over time.
And in that way, the spending is starting to impact on AWS results: sales rose 20% to $33 billion in the quarter, yet operating income increased only 9.6% to $11.4 billion. The gap indicates that Amazon’s heavy AI investments are compressing profit margins in the near term, even as the company bets on the infrastructure build-out to expand its business significantly over time.
Those investments are also weighing on cash generation: Amazon’s free cash flow dropped 69% over the past year to $14.8 billion, reflecting the massive outlays for data centers and infrastructure.
Amazon has invested and committed a total of $8 billion in Anthropic, initially structured as convertible notes. A portion of that investment converted to equity with Anthropic’s prior funding round in March.