Amazon saw healthy consumer sales and a pickup in its cloud computing business in its latest quarter, but the company told investors on Thursday to expect slowing growth ahead. Sales from October through December hit $187.8 billion, up 10 percent from a year earlier. Profit rose 88 percent, to $20 billion. Both were roughly in line with Wall Street expectations. But the company signaled that 2025 would be off to a weaker start, expecting sales to grow between 5 percent and 9 percent in the current quarter, and operating profit could potentially be lower than a year ago. Cloud computing grew 19 percent, to $28.8 billion, in the quarter. The results — seen as a sign that Amazon’s investments in artificial intelligence were paying off — were particularly strong given that the company’s top cloud competitors, Microsoft and Alphabet, recently reported results that underwhelmed investors. In the same quarter of 2023, Amazon’s cloud business grew just 13 percent. Investors are also focused on Amazon’s cloud computing business because it has become a profit engine for the company. Operating profit for the cloud business was $10.6 billion, which accounted for half of Amazon’s overall operating profit. The tech industry has been shaken by the recent release of an efficient artificial intelligence system by a Chinese start-up, DeepSeek. Amazon quickly made DeepSeek’s system available for customers to use, saying it is an example of how Amazon has built its approach to let users easily mix and match different A.I. tools. On a call with investors, Andy Jassy, Amazon’s chief executive, said A.I. should follow the pattern of other technological trends: As the systems becomes less expensive to deploy, customers will “get excited about what else they could build that they always thought was cost prohibitive before and they usually end up spending a lot more in total.” The company spent $26 billion building out data centers, warehouses and other capital expenses in the quarter, bringing its annual total to more than $77 billion. Mr. Jassy said that Amazon could have sold more cloud computing if it had more data center capacity, especially chips for A.I. Amazon told investors that the current rate of capital investments would continue throughout 2025, implying it could surpass $100 billion this year. Despite all of the investments, for the first time Amazon ended the year with more than $82 billion in cash. Amazon’s share price was down more than 4 percent in after-hours trading. Sales in Amazon’s North American retail business, which includes product sales as well as services like advertising and Prime memberships, grew 10 percent in the critical holiday shopping period. The retail industry generally reported surprisingly strong holiday sales. Amazon customers are buying more as the company offers faster shipping. It has reworked its operations to put more items closer to customers, making them quicker and less expensive to deliver. Amazon delivered more than nine billion items the same or next day in 2024, up from more than seven billion in 2023. Amazon’s North American operating margin grew to more than 8 percent. Two years ago, it did not even break even. The company has squeezed more profits out of its North American business by making its logistics efforts more efficient and expanding the most profitable parts of the business, such as advertising, which surpassed $17 billion in sales. The company ended the year with 1,556,000 employees, up just 2 percent.
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