Amazon revealed robust sales and profit growth despite significant one-time charges related to legal settlements and restructuring.

In its financial results for the third quarter ending September 30, 2025, Amazon’s net sales climbed 13% year-over-year to $180.2 billion, up from $158.9 billion in the same period of 2024. Excluding foreign exchange tailwinds, sales were up 12%.

There was no mention of the recent job cuts announcement. This week, Amazon said it will axe about 14,000 corporate jobs as it restructures around AI, trimming layers and bureaucracy while shifting work toward automation.

The company’s announcement kept everything relentlessly positive. It said growth was spread across key segments: North America sales rose 11% to $106.3 billion, international sales increased 14% to $40.9 billion, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) surged 20% to $33.0 billion.

The strong performance of AWS underscores Amazon’s pivotal role in the rapidly expanding artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud computing markets. The firm reckons businesses are increasingly turning to AWS for generative AI workloads, infrastructure scaling, and data analytics.

“We continue to see strong momentum and growth across Amazon as AI drives meaningful improvements in every corner of our business,” said Andy Jassy, President and CEO. “AWS is growing at a pace we haven’t seen since 2022, re-accelerating to 20.2% YoY.”

Profitability and legal impacts

Operating income held steady at $17.4 billion, identical to the previous year, but included two substantial charges — a $2.5 billion Federal Trade Commission (FTC) legal settlement and $1.8 billion in severance costs linked to planned job cuts. Excluding these, operating income would have reached $21.7 billion.

Net income increased sharply to $21.2 billion, or $1.95 per diluted share, compared with $15.3 billion, or $1.43 per share, a year earlier. A significant contributor to this boost was a $9.5 billion pre-tax gain from Amazon’s investment in AI startup Anthropic, underscoring the company’s deep financial ties to the broader AI ecosystem.

Operating cash flow rose 16% year-over-year to $130.7 billion. However, free cash flow fell to $14.8 billion, down from $47.7 billion, primarily due to a sharp increase in capital expenditures for data centers, logistics infrastructure, and renewable energy capacity. This indicates Amazon’s willingness to sacrifice short-term liquidity for long-term capacity in AI computing and fulfillment efficiency.

AI momentum

Jassy emphasized the company’s focus on scaling AI infrastructure, noting that Amazon has added more than 3.8 gigawatts of capacity in the past year. He also pointed to operational advances in the company’s fulfillment network and the rapid expansion of same-day delivery of perishable groceries, expected to reach over 2,300 communities by year’s end.

Amazon’s Q3 was marked by a series of major AI-related announcements:

• Project Rainier launched as one of the largest AI compute clusters ever built, using 500,000 Trainium2 chips to support Anthropic’s Claude models.
• AWS Bedrock expanded with new foundation models from OpenAI, DeepSeek, and Anthropic, among others.
• Quick Suite, Amazon’s new “AI teammate” app, allows employees to automate research and data tasks, boasting 80% time and 90% cost savings on complex work.
• Transform, an AI agent easing cloud migrations, saved customers an estimated 700,000 hours of manual effort.
• Nova Multimodal Embeddings and Web Grounding tools improved search accuracy and contextual information retrieval across multiple content types.

AWS also announced partnerships with major corporations such as Delta, Volkswagen, Fox, SAP, and ServiceNow, reinforcing its global enterprise reach.

And the rest

In retail, Amazon’s use of AI is reshaping how customers shop. Its AI-powered assistant Rufus has been used by 250 million customers this year, and users are 60% more likely to complete purchases when using it. AI-driven features like “Help Me Decide” now tailor shopping recommendations based on browsing and purchase history.

Over 1.3 million independent sellers are leveraging generative AI tools to create product listings, and Amazon’s fulfillment services have expanded to integrate with platforms like Walmart, Shopify, and SHEIN.

Amazon expanded its Project Kuiper satellite fleet to over 150 units, achieving downlink speeds above 1 Gbps. Commercial partnerships were signed with JetBlue and telecom providers in Australia and Kazakhstan.

Meanwhile, its Zoox subsidiary began offering fully autonomous robotaxi rides in Las Vegas, with Washington, D.C. set as the next testing site.

Amazon announced a $1 billion pay and benefits investment in U.S. employees, raising the average hourly wage to over $30. It also unveiled Future Ready 2030, a $2.5 billion initiative to expand education and training access for 50 million people.

Additionally, Amazon plans to hire hundreds of thousands of seasonal workers globally for the holiday period, signaling confidence in consumer demand heading into Q4.

For the fourth quarter of 2025, Amazon expects net sales between $206 billion and $213 billion, reflecting 10–13% year-over-year growth. Operating income is projected to range between $21 billion and $26 billion.

The company cautioned that results could be influenced by foreign exchange fluctuations, geopolitical uncertainty, inflationary pressures, and changes in consumer spending habits.

Last month. Amazon wrapped up its fall 2025 hardware event, which included a deeper look at Alexa+, the new Amazon Echo, and a redesigned Kindle Scribe.