AWS grew 37% last quarter, its fastest in more than four years. Will Amazon's earnings top $1.96 a share on Oct 29?

Amazon reported third-quarter 2026 diluted earnings of $1.89 a share on Oct. 29, below the roughly $1.96-to-$1.97 range analysts had expected and below the $1.95 a share it earned a year earlier. Net income fell to $20.7 billion from $21.2 billion, even as net sales rose 12% to $201.9 billion. Amazon Web Services, the company's cloud unit, grew 39% year-over-year to $46 billion in revenue, extending the acceleration that had made AWS growth the fastest in more than four years in the prior quarter. The earnings miss came despite that cloud strength, as rising capital spending on AI infrastructure and a slower advertising business weighed on the bottom line. Amazon guided to fourth-quarter net sales of $240 billion to $247 billion.

All bettors in the market had predicted earnings would top $1.96 a share, making this one of the more lopsided community misses of the week; the actual per-share result came in roughly 7 cents below even the low end of the forecast range. The result fit a broader pattern in the current earnings season, in which heavy AI-related capital expenditure is pressuring near-term profitability at major cloud providers even as underlying cloud-revenue growth stays strong.