Amazon Q3 earnings arrive after the closing bell on Thursday, October 29, 2026, and the numbers will answer the question hanging over the whole market this week: can the world's biggest cloud business keep accelerating while its owner spends at a pace never seen before? Wall Street expects Amazon to report revenue of about $202 billion for the third quarter, up roughly 12% from $180.2 billion a year earlier, with earnings per share of about $1.96. But the headline figures may matter less than two lines buried inside them: how fast Amazon Web Services grew, and how much more Amazon says it plans to spend on the data centres, chips and power that feed the artificial intelligence boom.
The report lands at the end of a bruising week for Big Tech's AI spending story. Alphabet's third-quarter results on Wednesday missed revenue expectations and sent its shares down sharply, even as Google Cloud surged, a reminder that investors are no longer willing to applaud growth at any price. Amazon, with a planned $220 billion of capital spending in 2026, faces the same test on Thursday evening, when it hosts its earnings call at 5 p.m. Eastern Time. The options market expects a share-price move of roughly 6.6% to 7.2% in either direction after the report, and recent Amazon results have moved by even more than options pricing implied.
Amazon will publish its third-quarter results after U.S. markets close on Thursday, October 29, 2026. The consensus, compiled from analyst estimates reported ahead of the release, puts revenue at roughly $202.1 billion to $202.3 billion, with earnings per share of about $1.96 to $1.97. The range of estimates is wide: revenue forecasts run from $199.4 billion to $209.6 billion, and earnings-per-share forecasts from $1.72 to $2.32, while consensus earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation stand at about $53.6 billion.
That revenue bar sits near the top of Amazon's own guidance. When the company reported its second-quarter results, it guided third-quarter net sales to between $197 billion and $202 billion, with operating income of $22.5 billion to $26.5 billion. Expectations landing at or slightly above the top of that range mean Amazon has little room for disappointment: merely meeting its own guidance could now read as a miss. Revision momentum, however, has leaned positive, with 11 analysts raising earnings forecasts over the past 30 days against three cuts, according to DailyFX.
Amazon's shares closed on Wednesday, October 28, at $254.60, up 0.59% on the day, after a steady post-2022 rally that set a fresh record high less than three months ago. Technical analysts put near-term support around $245, with a recovery above $250 offering a further positive signal and the August highs near $280 as the next target on the upside. The stock's reaction on Friday will be shaped less by the revenue line than by the two questions investors have been asking all earnings season: is cloud growth still accelerating, and is the spending behind it earning its keep?
Amazon's third quarter is, in several ways, a distorted mirror. Prime Day, the company's flagship shopping event, took place in July last year but moved to June this year, shifting a slice of product sales and advertising revenue from the third quarter into the second. Amazon itself has said that excluding that timing difference, third-quarter revenue growth would be nearly four percentage points higher than the reported figure. Card data tracked by Deutsche Bank showed U.S. and European e-commerce sales slowing noticeably at the start of the quarter before recovering, and the bank estimates third-quarter net retail sales growth of around 6%, with North American revenue of about $113.4 billion and international revenue of about $43.2 billion.
The cloud business, by contrast, faces no such distortion, and it has been accelerating. AWS revenue grew 37% year over year in the second quarter to $42.2 billion, its fastest pace in 18 quarters, with an operating margin of about 39.4%. That acceleration came as enterprises moved more workloads to the cloud and as demand for generative AI training, inference services and corporate agent applications surged. The question for the third quarter is whether that momentum continued, or whether capacity constraints capped it.
Capacity is the crux of the whole story. Jassy told venture firm Andreessen Horowitz on October 23 that AWS capacity was sold out for 2026 and largely sold out for 2027, with a substantial portion of 2028 also committed. In other words, Amazon's problem this quarter is not finding customers for its cloud; it is building fast enough to serve the ones it already has. That framing flips the usual earnings question on its head. If AWS growth comes in at the top end of expectations, it will be read as evidence that new data centre capacity is coming online on schedule. If it disappoints, investors will ask whether the constraint is construction, chips, power, or all three.
The spending behind that build-out is enormous and growing. Amazon's capital expenditure guidance for 2026 stands at about $220 billion, mostly for AWS data centres, AI chips, network infrastructure and satellite projects. Analysts are already looking past it: UBS estimates capital spending could exceed $300 billion by 2027, while Deutsche Bank offers an even more aggressive forecast of around $330 billion. Those are analyst estimates, not official guidance, but they frame the debate that will dominate Thursday's call. As front-loaded investment outpaces revenue realisation, free cash flow has come under significant pressure, and investors will want to know how Amazon judges the return on each new dollar of capacity.
Every segment will be scrutinised, but AWS is the deciding factor in Amazon Q3 earnings. Market expectations put AWS third-quarter net sales at about $45.4 billion to $45.6 billion, up roughly 37.6% to 38% from a year earlier. Bank of America expects growth of around 40%, based on the gradual rollout of new capacity, price adjustments and rising enterprise AI workloads. Deutsche Bank is more optimistic still, projecting AWS revenue of about $46.5 billion, or roughly 41% growth, and forecasting fourth-quarter AWS revenue of about $51.1 billion, with growth accelerating further to around 44%.
Growth alone will not settle the argument. In the second quarter, AWS earned an operating margin of about 39.4%, and as Amazon expands data centres, buys AI chips and increases infrastructure investment, depreciation expenses are climbing. Investors will therefore watch whether AWS can maintain its profit margins while sustaining fast growth. Only if new revenue covers the operating and depreciation costs of the infrastructure behind it will the cloud expansion sustainably improve Amazon's overall profitability. Margins, backlog and the pace at which new capacity converts into billed revenue matter as much as the growth rate itself.
Two AWS details deserve particular attention on the call. The first is demand for AI inference through Bedrock, Amazon's platform for AI models, which has become a central channel for enterprises putting AI applications into production. The second is the contribution of Amazon's custom chips, which are designed to cut the cost of AI workloads and reduce dependence on outside suppliers. Both featured in the run-up to the report as reasons AWS growth could keep accelerating even as the base gets larger.
Beyond the cloud, the segment forecasts sketch a broad-based quarter. Third-party seller services are expected at about $45.1 billion, advertising at about $20.9 billion, up nearly 18% year over year, and subscription services at about $13.9 billion. Advertising is expected to sustain double-digit growth even though the Prime Day shift altered merchants' ad spending rhythm, with demand-side platform and video advertising continuing to expand rapidly. Future advertising growth, analysts note, is more likely to come from off-platform traffic, streaming video and demand-side offerings, which use Amazon's shopping data to measure performance from exposure to purchase, than from squeezing more ads onto product pages.
Wall Street's published stance ahead of the report is broadly positive, though not unanimous in its price targets. UBS raised its price target from $318 to $348 while maintaining a Buy rating. Evercore kept its $355 target, arguing that AWS and advertising can support earnings growth. BMO Capital reaffirmed a positive rating with a $380 target, and Deutsche Bank maintained its $325 target while noting that AWS growth could drive upward revisions to future performance expectations. Across 44 Wall Street analysts, the average 12-month price target is $331.54, with a high of $400 and a low of $230, according to TipRanks data.
Jassy's own words set the tone for the spending debate. Asked about further investment in AI infrastructure, he said that additional spending "wouldn't be a bad use of capital", a remark that investors will weigh against the free-cash-flow pressure that such spending creates. The comment captures Amazon's position in a sentence: demand is not the constraint, capacity is, and building more of it is the rational response. Whether shareholders agree will depend on the numbers that accompany the rhetoric on Thursday evening.
The broader market context adds pressure. The Federal Reserve held interest rates at 3.75% to 4.00% on Wednesday, October 28, with Chair Kevin Warsh warning that inflation remains elevated, and third-quarter gross domestic product figures are due on Thursday, less than a week before the November 3 midterm elections. Alphabet's miss the same evening showed how quickly sentiment can turn when a hyperscaler spends heavily without beating expectations. Amazon is the last of the three big hyperscalers to report this week, which means it will be judged against both of its peers' results.
Amazon is not the only company reporting on Thursday evening. Intel, SanDisk, Strategy and Coinbase also report after the close, making it a crowded night for investors tracking AI hardware, storage, crypto and cloud demand. But Amazon's report is the one with the widest read-across: its cloud numbers speak to enterprise AI demand, its retail numbers to the American consumer, and its advertising numbers to the health of digital marketing. Few single reports touch so many corners of the economy at once.
Amazon's report matters far beyond its own shareholders because it sits at the intersection of the two forces defining this market: the AI investment boom and the American consumer. On one side, Amazon is one of the largest buyers of data centre capacity, chips and power in the world, and its spending plans are a bellwether for the entire AI infrastructure trade. If Amazon signals that spending will keep rising into 2027, suppliers from chipmakers to power providers will cheer; if it hints at restraint, the whole trade will reprice. On the other side, its retail business is a real-time gauge of household spending in the final stretch before the holiday season, and its advertising business reflects how confident brands feel about that consumer.
The report also matters for the AI spending debate that has dominated earnings season. Microsoft, Alphabet and Meta have all faced the same question — whether hundreds of billions of dollars of infrastructure spending will generate commensurate returns — and investors have punished vague answers. Amazon's case is arguably the strongest of the group, because its cloud capacity is sold out rather than speculative. But that strength cuts both ways: a sold-out cloud that still disappoints on growth would suggest the bottleneck is physical — power, construction, chips — rather than demand, and physical bottlenecks are harder and slower to fix.
There is a further wrinkle. Amazon's $8 billion cumulative investment in Anthropic, the AI company behind Claude, which filed for an initial public offering on October 26 at an expected valuation of around $1.5 trillion, ties Amazon's fortunes to the most closely watched AI listing in years. Commentary on that relationship, and on advertising including Prime Video, will be watched for clues about how Amazon plans to monetise AI beyond selling raw computing power. Logistics costs may also feature, after UPS said it had cut millions of lower-margin Amazon deliveries, a reminder that the retail business still runs on trucks, planes and warehouses as well as servers.
The numbers arrive after the close on Thursday, October 29, followed by the earnings call at 5 p.m. Eastern Time, where Jassy and his team will face questions on AWS growth, margins, capital spending and fourth-quarter guidance. The fourth-quarter outlook may matter more than the third-quarter result itself: it covers the holiday shopping season, the busiest period of Amazon's year, and it will set the bar for the first read on 2027 spending. Any update to the $220 billion capital expenditure figure, or any hint about 2027, will move the shares.
On Friday, the market will deliver its verdict, and the reaction will ripple outward. A strong AWS print with firm margins would validate the AI infrastructure trade and lift suppliers and cloud peers. A soft print, or a spending guide that alarms investors, would deepen the scepticism that followed Alphabet's miss and put Apple's report, also due this week, under even greater scrutiny. Either way, Thursday's report will shape how investors judge the economics of the AI boom heading into the final weeks of 2026.
Longer term, the story to watch is capacity. If Amazon can convert its sold-out order book into revenue as new data centres come online, AWS growth could accelerate into the fourth quarter, just as Deutsche Bank forecasts. If power, chips or construction slow that conversion, growth will stay strong but capped, and the debate will shift from demand to delivery. Thursday's report is the first hard evidence of which of those stories is true.
Amazon reports third-quarter 2026 results after the U.S. market closes on Thursday, October 29, 2026, and hosts an earnings conference call at 5 p.m. Eastern Time the same day.
Analysts expect revenue of about $202 billion, up roughly 12% from $180.2 billion a year earlier, and earnings per share of about $1.96, roughly flat year over year. Revenue estimates range from $199.4 billion to $209.6 billion.
Market expectations put AWS revenue at about $45.4 billion to $45.6 billion, up roughly 38% year over year. Bank of America expects about 40% growth and Deutsche Bank about 41%, with fourth-quarter growth forecast to accelerate further.
Amazon plans about $220 billion of capital spending in 2026, mostly for AWS data centres, AI chips and network infrastructure. Investors want to know whether that spending is converting into revenue quickly enough, and what it signals for 2027, where some analysts forecast spending above $300 billion.
Fourth-quarter guidance for the holiday season, AWS operating margins, advertising revenue of about $20.9 billion, the effect of the Prime Day timing shift on retail, and any update on AI inference demand through Bedrock and Amazon's custom chips.
Related coverage: Big Tech earnings test: Alphabet, Amazon and Apple face AI spending verdict; Alphabet Q3 earnings miss sends shares down as AI spending burns cash; Meta $95 billion AI raise leads a $198 billion day of AI spending.
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