Fresh off one of the best quarters for Amazon’s cloud-computing division, CEO Andy Jassy told analysts he believes the company could have two trillion-dollar businesses in the next five to 10 years.
Though Amazon missed Wall Street earnings estimates on Thursday and the company continues to burn through cash on its artificial intelligence expansion, Jassy trumpeted the cloud revenue growth. The segment has become an important benchmark each quarter for Amazon’s return on AI-related capital investments.
Amazon Web Services, the cloud arm of the company, reported $46 billion in revenue for the third quarter, a 39% increase from the year before, reflecting its fastest growth in five years.
Overall, Amazon’s revenue grew by 12%, with the company posting a $20.69 billion profit.
The cloud division has long been the company’s primary moneymaker. While it doesn’t bring in the same revenue as the retail side, which reported $156 billion for the third quarter, it’s much more profitable.
Most of Amazon’s $201.9 billion revenue from July through September came from its e-commerce business, but the retail division’s vast logistics network has enormous costs. The division’s revenue showed slower growth compared with last year at least in part because the company moved its Prime Day sales bonanza from the third quarter to the second quarter this year.
Despite sluggishness in retail, Jassy was bullish on that part of the company as well.
He said Thursday that he expects both sides of Amazon — retail and cloud computing — to reach annual revenue numbers beyond $1 trillion within the next decade. Last year, Amazon’s retail division brought in more than $588 billion in revenue while AWS reported $128.7 billion.
“There has never been a trillion dollar revenue business,” Jassy said in a news release. “And we may have two of them in the next 5-10 years.”
While the company has always poured money into capital expenditures, those figures have shot up amid the AI boom. Amazon’s capital spending rose from about $52.7 billion in 2023 to $131.8 billion in 2025. The company is on pace to spend $220 billion this year.
All that spending is starting to eat into Amazon’s free cash flow. The company reported negative $42.4 billion in free cash flow over the past 12 months, while a year earlier that figure was a positive $14.8 billion.
Aside from Amazon Web Services and the company’s online marketplace, Amazon’s core business ventures include groceries, video streaming, advertising and pharmaceuticals. Chief Financial Officer Brian Olsavsky said the company’s satellite internet service, Amazon Leo, will launch this year. The mounting costs to get that operational will put a dent in fourth-quarter results.
Jassy said AWS is projected to post $184 billion in revenue this year, and the company believes growth won’t slow down for at least the next two years, driven by AI demands.
The company claims the only thing holding back revenue growth in AWS is that it can’t get data centers online fast enough to meet demand. Jassy said the company had a backlog of contracts worth $578 billion collectively for AWS customers.
Beneath revenues are figures that cause jitters among investors.
Most of Amazon’s capital expenditures — investments to support longer-term growth — are going toward the company’s AI build-out, mostly in the form of data centers and custom computer chips. Even as Amazon begins developing its own chips, which it views as a lucrative business, the company says it won’t slow down spending over the next few years.
Amazon didn’t raise projections on how much it plans to spend on capital costs this year, a figure it bumped from $200 billion to $220 billion during an earnings report in July. To reach $1 trillion in revenue for AWS, Jassy said the company will be spending meaningfully.
“What we’re seeing with AI is the biggest transformation of our lifetime,” Jassy said when responding to a question about how much the company plans to spend over the next few years. “The idea of being able to grow 39% … and ultimately end up as a trillion-dollar-plus business, we’re going to invest to continue being the leader.”
Jassy acknowledged the rate of spending is rising quickly in a short amount of time, gesturing to the worries investors have.
“If this type of acceleration happened over 25 years and you could spread those capital expenditures, yeah, it’d be more convenient,” he said. “But that’s not the world we live in, and that’s not the opportunity.”
After news of the missed quarterly earnings target, Amazon’s stock plunged by as much as 9% in extended trading.
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