Amazon

Posts a $75.9 billion net capex quarter, more than double a year earlier, and watches trailing-twelve-month free cash flow swing to a $42.4 billion deficit from a $14.8 billion surplus, even as AWS revenue grows 39% to a $184 billion run rate and CEO Andy Jassy says capacity remains largely committed through 2027.

A VP memo tells software engineers to stop treating AI token counts and lines-of-code as productivity metrics, disclosing that an internal leaderboard, "Kirorank," which had rewarded high AI usage, was shut down in May after engineers gamed it by running agents on trivial tasks.

Cuts up to 250 jobs in its devices and services unit (Kindle, Echo, Alexa), mostly software roles, during the same week it shipped five new Alexa-branded products and circulated an internal memo telling engineers to adopt AI tools or risk being left behind.

AWS CFO John Felton tells Axios AI infrastructure spending is paying off ahead of schedule, citing under-3-year server paybacks on a nearly $500B order backlog, days before Jeff Bezos tells Fox News the same month's Stores-division layoffs were about correcting pandemic-era overhiring, not AI — two executives offering contradictory explanations for the same job cuts ahead of Oct. 29 earnings.

Agrees to explore a 960-megawatt, 12-reactor small modular reactor project with American Electric Power and X-energy on the site of a demolished Indiana coal plant, structured so Amazon alone — not AEP's other ratepayers — absorbs the cost/schedule risk; X-energy has not yet broken ground on any commercial reactor and is fighting a Texas lawsuit over its first planned site.

Blocks Meta's Muse AI shopping agent from Amazon.com over undisclosed integration and bot-access concerns, even as Shopify moves the opposite direction and adds Muse as a commerce channel — the clearest split yet in how platforms are responding to consumer AI agents eroding customer inertia.

Committed $1 billion to build a forward-deployed engineering unit, one of three vendor-led responses (with Microsoft and Anthropic) to a talent bottleneck an executive search firm estimates at only about 2,000 qualified engineers nationwide.

Cuts jobs in stores, customer service, and retail support days after confirming a record $220B AI infrastructure budget, while separately recruiting laid-off staff back for AWS's cloud and agentic-AI teams.

Entergy reportedly warns it could curtail or scale back power to AWS's data centers across central Mississippi during periods of peak electricity demand — a reminder that even AI-friendly utility contracts keep hyperscale compute on a leash.

Rohit Prasad, who led development of the Amazon Nova foundation model family, departs for the CEO role at Boston Dynamics after CEO Andy Jassy restructured Amazon's AI organization and handed the advanced-AI portfolio to AWS's Peter DeSantis.

AWS pledges more than $1B over five years to data-center host communities and ends government NDAs, after local opposition blocked tens of billions of dollars in projects this year.

Holds a $50B stake in OpenAI's cap table even as SoftBank and other investors pour in $122B of outside capital.