The big question looming over Amazon's earnings (www.businessinsider.com)

Amazon’s upcoming quarterly report will be scrutinized not just for sales but for what it reveals about the company’s recent decision to cut 14,000 jobs: is this a defensive cost-savings move because growth is slowing, or a sign that AI-led automation is making operations far more efficient? Wall Street’s focal point is AWS revenue — expected at $32.4 billion (about 18% year‑over‑year growth for Q3) — a benchmark that investors and analysts will use to read Amazon’s trajectory. For context, Microsoft reported Azure growth of ~40% and Google Cloud ~34% this quarter, and Google disclosed a surge in billion‑dollar cloud deals, underscoring fierce, AI-driven competition in cloud infrastructure. For the AI/ML community the stakes are concrete: AWS’s performance signals the health of a major source of training and inference infrastructure, partnerships (notably with Anthropic), and continued capital for specialized accelerators and managed services. If AWS outperforms expectations, it would suggest AI adoption is fueling cloud demand and operational efficiency; a miss would heighten concerns about AWS losing steam to rivals and could reshape enterprise AI procurement and pricing. Either way, the earnings call will clarify how Amazon’s AI investments translate into revenue, capacity, and competitive positioning in the cloud‑AI stack.