Amazon Q3 2025 earnings: profit jumps as AWS growth accelerates, despite one-time charges
Amazon's net income nearly doubled to $21.2 billion as cloud unit AWS grew at its fastest pace in years, even as one-time legal and severance charges weighed on operating income.
| Q3 2025 | Reported |
|---|---|
| EPS | $1.95 |
| Revenue | $180.17B |
Figures as reported by the company to the SEC for the quarter ended September 30, 2025. Analyst estimates are not part of a filing, so no comparison to expectations is shown.
Key takeaways
- Net sales for the quarter ended September 30 rose 13% from a year earlier to $180.2 billion, and net income rose to $21.2 billion (about $1.95 per share) from $15.3 billion a year earlier.
- Operating income came in flat versus a year ago at $17.4 billion because it absorbed two one-time items: a $2.5 billion legal settlement with the Federal Trade Commission and $1.8 billion in severance costs tied to planned corporate layoffs of about 14,000 roles. Amazon said operating income would have been $21.7 billion without those charges.
- Amazon Web Services, the company’s cloud-computing division, was the standout: its revenue grew 20% to $33.0 billion, the fastest pace in about three years, and AWS operating income rose to $11.4 billion from $10.4 billion a year earlier.
- CEO Andy Jassy said AWS is “growing at a pace we haven’t seen since 2022,” pointing to strong demand for AI and core cloud infrastructure, and said the company added more than 3.8 gigawatts of data-center capacity over the past year to keep up.
- North America retail sales grew 11% to $106.3 billion and international sales grew 14% to $40.9 billion, showing the core shopping business kept expanding alongside the cloud unit.
- Amazon is spending heavily to keep up with AI and cloud demand: capital expenditures were $34.2 billion in the quarter and roughly $89.9 billion for the year so far, with full-year 2025 spending expected to be about $125 billion and set to rise further in 2026.
- For the current quarter, Amazon guided to revenue of $206.0 billion to $213.0 billion and operating income of $21.0 billion to $26.0 billion, spanning the holiday shopping season.
- Trailing-twelve-month profitability metrics improved alongside the quarter’s results, with net profit margin around 17.4% and return on equity around 30.5%, reflecting the combination of steady sales growth and AWS’s outsized profit contribution.
- AWS’s backlog of contracted future business grew to about $200 billion by the end of the quarter, a sign of continued demand even before accounting for large deals signed after the quarter closed.
Q3 2025 in context
| Metric | Sep 2025 | Sep 2024 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Revenue | $180.2B | $158.9B | +13.4% |
| Net income | $21.2B | $15.3B | +38.2% |
| Free cash flow | $430M | $3.4B | -87.2% |
| Diluted EPS | $1.95 | $1.43 | +36.4% |
| Gross margin | 50.8% | 49.0% | +1.8 pts |
| Operating margin | 9.7% | 11.0% | -1.3 pts |
| Net margin | 11.8% | 9.6% | +2.1 pts |
Figures for the quarter ended Sep 2025 and the quarter ended Sep 2024, as reported to the SEC.
Each company's quarter ending in calendar Q3 '25, as reported to the SEC. A peer that reported no revenue figure for that quarter is left out.
How the stock took it
Amazon.com, Inc. closed at $222.86 on Oct 30, 2025, the last session before the report, and at $254.00 on Nov 3, 2025, the first session after it — +14.0% across the report.
Closes from the market's daily record. Each figure spans the report date — from the last session that closed before it to the first that closed after — because a company may report before the open or after the close.
Sources: company report · CIO Dive · Computer Weekly