{"text":[[{"start":8.28,"text":"Amazon will lift capital expenditure to $220bn this year with higher memory costs pushing up the cloud giant’s planned spending."}],[{"start":16,"text":"Andy Jassy, Amazon’s chief executive, told investors on Thursday that the group would raise guidance for the full year from $200bn, with the majority of spending allocated towards AI and data centres."}],[{"start":27.88,"text":"The Seattle-based cloud giant’s chief said the spending was warranted because the group did not have sufficient capacity to meet booming demand. Sales at Amazon Web Services, its cloud division, rose 37 per cent year on year to $42.2bn, beating analysts’ expectations."}],[{"start":45.16,"text":"AWS growth in the quarter was the group’s highest in more than four years, helping push shares up as much as 9 per cent higher in after-hours trading on Thursday."}],[{"start":54.18,"text":"“We’ve long believed AWS could become a few-hundred-billion-dollar-revenue business, and now believe it’ll be at least double that,” Jassy told investors on the company’s earnings call."}],[{"start":63.48,"text":"Amazon has been pushing to aggressively grow AWS amid pressure from rivals including Google, whose cloud unit grew 82 per cent year over year to $24.8bn in the second quarter."}],[{"start":74.92,"text":"Its increase in capex puts the ecommerce giant on pace to spend more than Google, which last week raised guidance for the full year to between $195bn and $205bn."}],[{"start":86.92,"text":"The company has undertaken sweeping lay-offs this year in an attempt to reduce costs and help finance its vast AI investment."}],[{"start":94,"text":"Capital expenditure across Amazon climbed to $53bn in the quarter with the group’s free cash flow turning negative on a trailing 12-month basis to minus $7.6bn."}],[{"start":105.32,"text":"Jassy said the company would experience pressure on free cash flow for several years as it raced to bring data centre capacity online. He argued that this would ease over time, similar to the initial AWS build-out."}],[{"start":117.92,"text":"“As we get a few years out, and the revenue growth outpaces the incremental capex growth, which will happen at some point.”"}],[{"start":124.6,"text":"Operating income for the group, which spans advertising, cloud, ecommerce and media, climbed 43 per cent to $27.5bn."}],[{"start":133.4,"text":"Jassy on Thursday said Amazon’s AI business and its chips unit had each reached an annual run rate for revenue of $25bn."}],[{"start":142.88,"text":"“We’re unusually well positioned for this AI inflection,” he said, highlighting the group’s data centre deals with start-up AI labs Anthropic and OpenAI."}],[{"start":152.24,"text":"Amazon has committed to invest up to $75bn in Anthropic and OpenAI this past year as it backs multiple leading AI labs in an attempt to drive sales of its Trainium chips and ensure the two companies’ models are available for its cloud customers."}],[{"start":168.4,"text":"Amazon last week shuttered one of its AI labs in San Francisco, laying off dozens of research staff, according to people familiar with the matter. It comes as the group has refocused its in-house AI model effort under former OpenAI researcher Pieter Abbeel following an earlier organisational reshuffle."}],[{"start":187,"text":"Jassy told investors the group was still pursuing its own leading AI model in a bid to reduce costs and widen its own margins."}],[{"start":195,"text":"“Within the next few years we’re going to have at least half a dozen models [that] are comparably good to each other,” he said. “One of them will be ours.”"}],[{"start":203.36,"text":"Brian Olsavsky, Amazon’s chief financial officer, said on Thursday that the group still had a “lot of options available” to finance its AI spend but declined to comment on future plans."}],[{"start":214.24,"text":"In March it set out to raise about $50bn through corporate bond issuances, upsizing the offering from $37bn following strong demand. But it faced weakening interest in long-dated debt when it sold $25bn in bonds earlier this month, with investors demanding wider spreads."}],[{"start":235.4,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1785468063_8060.mp3"}