Amazon Sales Rise 13% to $180 Billion in Q3, AWS Revenue Jumps 20%

Amazon reported its third-quarter 2025 earnings Thursday, revealing revenue rose 13% for the June-September period.

The financial update comes amid mass layoffs at Amazon: The company is undergoing a workforce reduction of 14,000 employees this week.

During a call with investors following the earnings release, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy fielded a question about the layoffs at Amazon this week and backtracked on AI innovations being the primary driver for the cuts.

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“The announcement that we made a few days ago was not really financially-driven, and it’s not even really AI-driven. Not right now at least. It really, it’s culture,” Jassy said. “And if you grow as fast as we did for several years — the size of businesses, the number of people, the number of locations, the types of businesses you’re in — you end up with a lot more people than what you had before, and you end up with a lot more layers. And when that happens, sometimes, without realizing it, you can weaken the ownership of the people that you have who are doing the actual work and who own most of the two-way-door decisions. The ones that should be made quickly and right at the front line. And it can lead to slowing you down.”

“As a leadership team, we are committed to operating like the world’s largest startup,” he continued. “That means removing layers. It means increasing the amount of ownership that people have, and it means inventing and moving quickly. And I don’t know if there’s ever been a time in the history of Amazon or maybe business in general, with the technology transformation happening right now, where it’s important to be lean, important to be flat, and it’s important to move fast, and that’s what we’re going to do.””

For the Amazon Web Services (AWS) segment, Amazon saw a 20% increase in sales compared to Q3 2024 with revenue standing at $33 billion.

The ecommerce giant’s domestic sales were up 11% at $106.3 billion. International sales reached $40.9 billion, up 14% (or 10%, when accounting for foreign exchange rates). Amazon ad sales rose 24% to $17.7 billion.

Wall Street forecast earnings per share (EPS) of $1.56 on $177.8 billion in revenue, according to analyst consensus data provided by LSEG. Amazon reported adjusted EPS of $1.95 on $180.2 billion in revenue.

Per Amazon, “Operating income was $17.4 billion in the third quarter, compared with $17.4 billion in third quarter 2024. Third quarter 2025 operating income includes two special charges—$2.5 billion related to a legal settlement with the Federal Trade Commission and $1.8 billion in estimated severance costs primarily related to planned role eliminations. Without these charges, operating income would have been $21.7 billion.”