Yahoo Finance Amazon beats forecasts, helped by AI
STORY: Amazon beat forecasts over the first quarter, with a little help from the bots.
The e-commerce titan said Tuesday that interest in AI helped drive growth for its cloud computing division.
That saw total sales jump 13% to just over $143 billion.
Net income more than tripled to over $10 billion.
AI has been a fixation in Silicon Valley since ChatGPT debuted in late 2022.
Now Amazon says it’s pouring money into the technology, with capital spending set to jump largely as a result.
It’s competing with firms like Google-owner Alphabet, and Microsoft, which is a big backer of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI.
Amazon offers a chatbot dubbed “Q” for businesses.
And it has “Rufus” to help customers find products on its website.
It wasn’t all good news for investors on Tuesday though.
Amazon disappointed analysts with a forecast for current-quarter revenue that was below Wall Street expectations.
It also declined to follow Alphabet and Facebook-parent Meta in declaring a dividend.
That leaves Amazon and Tesla as the only members of the so-called “Magnificent 7” tech stocks not to offer an investor payout.
