Amazon focuses on AI and AWS in $187bn fourth quarter results

Amazon has credited its “remarkable innovation” for sales increasing 10% to $187.8bn in the fourth quarter which ended 31 December 2024.

The marketplace giant saw sales in North America jump 10% year-over-year to $115.6bn. International sales grew 8% year-over-year to $43.4bn, with AWS sales were up 19% year-over-year to $28.8bn.

It also had the biggest Q4 for Kindle device sales in over a decade, with a new lineup of Kindles driving a 30% year-over-year increase in devices sold.

“When we look back on this quarter several years from now, I suspect what we’ll most remember is the remarkable innovation delivered across all of our businesses,” said Andy Jassy, president and CEO of Amazon.

“None more so than in AWS where we introduced our new Trainium2 AI chip, our own foundation models in Amazon Nova, a plethora of new models and features in Amazon Bedrock that give customers flexibility and cost savings, liberating transformations in Amazon Q to migrate from old platforms, and the next edition of Amazon SageMaker to pull data, analytics, and AI together more concertedly.

“These benefits are often realised by customers (and the business) several months down the road, but these are substantial enablers in this emerging technology environment and we’re excited to see what customers build.”

The Trainium2 AI chips are built to offer 30-40% better price-performance than current generations of GPU-based instances, according to Amazon.

The fourth quarter also saw Amazon introduce its Project Rainier. A collaboration with Anthropic using hundreds of thousands of Trainium2 chips to build the world’s largest AI compute cluster. It also introduced new foundation models in Amazon Bedrock from DeepSeek, Luma AI, and poolside.

Amazon Nova is the etailer’s own family of foundation models designed to match in intelligence against the leading models in the world. The models also offer lower latency, lower price, and integration with key Bedrock features like fine-tuning, model distillation, knowledge bases, and agentic capabilities. Companies including Deloitte and SAP have already harnessed Amazon Nova capabilities.

Stay informed
Our editor carefully curates two newsletters a week filled with up-to-date news, analysis and research, click here to subscribe to the FREE newsletter sent straight to your inbox and why not follow us on LinkedIn to receive the latest updates on our research and analysis.

The post Amazon focuses on AI and AWS in $187bn fourth quarter results appeared first on InternetRetailing.