Topic

AMZN

A collection of 63 issues

The Bid Shading Threat to Amazon Advertising

Almost six years ago, NYT published a critical piece on Amazon’s business practices with 3P sellers. The reason I still remember that piece after all these years is that the article had an interesting background on how Amazon made its foray into advertising. From the piece: “For years, the

License to Chase the AI Frontier

While looking at Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, I was quite struck by what they all have in common. The top model developers except one all have one thing in common: they are all currently founder-led companies. Alphabet is the sole exception. But even in Alphabet’s case, the company

Digital Advertising Industry Snapshot 2Q'26

As I do after every quarter, let me share the snapshot of the overall digital advertising industry. Let me first explain some changes for this quarter’s edition. First of all, digital advertising industry is defined as Alphabet’s advertising revenue+ Meta’s advertising revenue+ Snap’s ad revenue+ Pinterest

Hyperscalers vs AI Labs Debate, and the Moving AI Frontier

I thought I would cover Microsoft’s earnings today, but let me first respond to a tweet by SouthernValue and then I will share some thoughts on the state of AI models. I recommend you read his pushback to my yesterday’s piece before you read the rest. I will

Amazon 2Q'26: AWS Gets the Love

In 1Q’26 earnings coverage of Amazon, I mentioned AWS would likely grow by ~35% in 2Q’26. AWS did slightly better than that as it grew by ~37%! For a $169 Billion run-rate business, AWS growth certainly seems mind boggling. I will talk more about AWS later, but

The Honeymoon Phase of Capacity

Although I am yet to write any Deep Dive on any neocloud, I still like to pay close attention to what they are saying during their earnings calls. Both CoreWeave and Nebius had some interesting nuggets in their 1Q’26 call. Let’s start with CoreWeave. Just like the hyperscalers,

Digital Advertising Industry Snapshot 1Q'26

As I do after every quarter, let me share the snapshot of the overall digital advertising industry. Please note that digital advertising industry is defined as Alphabet’s advertising revenue+ Meta’s advertising revenue+ Snap revenue+ Pinterest revenue+ Microsoft Search advertising revenue+ Amazon advertising revenue+ Trade Desk revenue+ AppLovin revenue.

Amazon 1Q'26: Rosy Near-term but "Cloudy" Long-term

Amazon’s highlight from 1Q’26 was that AWS has accelerated to 28%, which was the highest growth rate in the last 15 quarters. In fact, looking at the guide, it appears even a more pronounced acceleration is likely for 2Q’26. I will talk more about AWS, but as

Jassy's Defense

Since Andy Jassy became CEO of Amazon on July 5, 2021, the stock has not only noticeably lagged broader benchmarks such as S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 but also underperformed every single big tech companies in Mag7 (Nvidia not shown in the chart since it transforms the Y-

The Neocloud Trojan Horse

One of the most frequent pushbacks that I have received to my recent posts on AWS (see here, and here) is that the neoclouds are not a legitimate concern for hyperscalers such as AWS and Azure in the long term. Frankly speaking, I myself operated under this assumption for the