Amazon Retail Expenditure will tilt towards Cloud Business with AI and Big Model

In the morning of April 28, Beijing time, Amazon said that in order to strengthen the development of generative AI and large language models, it will shift some of its retail spending to the Amazon Cloud Services (AWS) division.

Amazon today reported revenue of 127.358 billion yuan in the first quarter of 2023, an increase of 9% over the same period last year. Revenue and amortized earnings per share exceeded expectations, and the outlook for the second quarter was also higher than expected, driving its share price to rise sharply.

Amazon fell more than 2% in after-hours trading, erasing a 4.61% gain at the close.

Amazon AWS, an important growth engine, posted net sales of $21.35 billion in the quarter, up 16 per cent from a year earlier, the slowest pace since 2014 and down from 20 per cent in the fourth quarter of last year.

In addition, Amazon's advertising revenue for the quarter was $9.5 billion, up 21% from a year earlier, while net sales at online stores were $51.096 billion, roughly flat from a year earlier.