Corporate America just entered earnings season for the quarter ended Sept. 30. It comes at a critical moment, because investors are grappling with elevated inflation, rising interest rates, and turbulence in the artificial intelligence (AI) industry — all while the S&P 500 index is trading at a historically expensive valuation. So, strong corporate earnings will be necessary to keep this bull market going.
Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) is one of the companies at the center of the AI boom. It operates an industry-leading cloud platform, develops its own large language models (LLMs), and even designs its own data center chips. It’s scheduled to release its operating results for the third quarter on Oct. 29, and they will give investors some insight into the current state of the AI industry.
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Amazon stock looks attractively valued right now, so is it a buy heading into the report?
All eyes on Amazon Web Services
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is Amazon’s cloud computing platform, which offers a growing portfolio of tools and services that enterprises need to develop and deploy AI software. It’s consistently the company’s fastest growing business segment, and it’s also the most profitable, so its results will be Wall Street’s main focus on Oct. 29.
AWS operates state-of-the-art data centers all over the world which house advanced AI chips from suppliers like Nvidia, and it rents the computing capacity to its enterprise customers. However, Amazon also designs its own chips now, like Trainium2 and Trainium3, which it says offer better price-performance than the competition.
Amazon not only rents these chips, but also sells them to customers, and sales revenue was tracking at an annualized rate of over $25 billion on June 30. This could become a huge business over the long term, so look out for some updated numbers on Oct. 29.
In addition to computing capacity, enterprises also need ready-made LLMs to sit at the foundation of their AI software projects, and the AWS Bedrock platform offers a library of 100 of them. AWS also built an AI-powered coding assistant called Kiro that can help programmers bring software to life more quickly.
AWS generated $42.2 billion in total revenue during the second quarter of 2026, up 37% from the year-ago period. That growth rate accelerated for the fourth-straight period, so the platform was carrying significant momentum into the third quarter.
