Amazon Q1 Earnings Top Forecasts; ‘Project Hail Mary’ Gets Shoutout

Amazon surpassed Wall Street forecasts with revenue of $181.5 billion in the March quarter, up 17% from the year earlier, the company reported Wednesday. CEO Andy Jassy noted that Project Hail Mary‘s nearly $615 million at the box office to date among the company’s achievements for the three months.

Sales and profit numbers were a beat as was the key Amazon Web Services cloud business with $37.6 billion in revenue, up 28%.

Net income rose to $30 billion from $17 billion, including a pre-tax gain of $16.8 billion from investments in Anthropic. Earnings per share of $2.78 rose from $1.59.

Free cash flow dipped to $1.2 billion for the trailing 12 months as Amazon ramped up investments in artificial intelligence. There’s an AI arms race on now among tech giants and stocks were volatile in late trading as a handful including Microsoft, Meta and Alphabet also reported numbers after the bell. Amazon shares, which have had a great run this year, are off 4% after hours.

Altogether, Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta reported more than $130 billion in quarterly capital expenditures Wednesday as they build AI data centers, said the NYT, tallying up the numbers, and there’s much more to come.

“AWS is growing 28% (our fastest growth in 15 quarters) on a very large base, our chips business topped a $20 billion revenue run rate (growing triple digits year-over-year), Advertising grew to over $70 billion in TTM [trailing 12-month] revenue, and unit growth in our Stores reached 15% (the highest since the tail end of Covid lockdowns),” Jassy said in the earnings release. “We also hit exciting milestones with delivery speed (more than 1 billion items same-day or overnight in 2026 and counting), Project Hail Mary (nearly $615 million at the box office to date and the second most successful non-sequel, non-franchise opening of recent memory), and Amazon Leo continues to resonate with prospective customers, with Delta Airlines the latest to sign on.”

“We’re making customers’ lives easier and better every day across all our businesses, and their response is driving significant growth,” he said. “We’re in the middle of some of the biggest inflections of our lifetime, we’re well positioned to lead, and I’m very optimistic about what’s ahead for our customers and Amazon.”

Media and entertainment, including Amazon MGM Studios and Prime Video, falls under Amazon services and is not broken out. But executives at CinemaCon in Las Vegas early this month stressed a commitment to theatrical releasing. “This isn’t a test or an experiment. Our commitment to release at least 15 films every year into your theaters is on schedule,” Mike Hopkins, head of Prime Video & Amazon MGM Studios, promised theater owners at the annual gathering of exhibitors.

Achievements the company cited during the quarter:

Amazon execs will hold a conference call at 5:30 p.m. ET today.