Amazon
16 items across 15 editions. First seen Mon 14 Sep, last seen Fri 30 Oct.
- Amazon's release says "Free cash flow decreased to an outflow of $42.4 billion for the trailing twelve months," against "free cash flow inflow of $14.8 billion for the trailing twelve months ended September 30, 2025," and that "We continue to expect 2026 cash capital expenditures to be approximately $220 billion." CNBC reports capital expenditures "reached $77.3 billion during the quarter, ticking up from $35.1 billion one year earlier, and coming in well above analysts' estimated $58.7 billion, according to FactSet."
- The operating business is not the problem. Net sales "increased 12% to $201.9 billion in the third quarter, compared with $180.2 billion in third quarter 2025"; "Operating income was $28.1 billion and operating margin was 13.9%—Amazon's highest operating margin ever"; and "AWS segment sales increased 39% year-over-year to $46.0 billion." Purchases of property and equipment were $175,670 million for the nine months to 30 September 2026, against $92,297 million a year earlier.
- Amazon said the cash shortfall was "primarily due to an increase in purchases of property and equipment as a result of AI investments," and CEO Andy Jassy told investors the company expects to "spend meaningfully more in 2027." The release projects AWS revenue growth "of over 40% both in 2027 and in 2028"; Jassy said the chips business "continues to grow triple-digit percentages year over year" and that Trainium will be made available externally "late in 2027."
- Markets read the spending, not the margin: Reuters reports Amazon shares down 7.2% in premarket trading on 30 October, with Nasdaq futures down more than 2%. Fourth-quarter revenue guidance of $240 billion to $247 billion has a midpoint below the $244.5 billion LSEG consensus. The AWS and Trainium projections are company statements about the future and are not verified.
- As reported by Mid-Missouri Business and relayed by DCD, "a representative from Amazon informed Montgomery County commissioners of its intentions to expand its data center presence in the area by up to 15 new data center buildings", on "890 acres of land at a separate site" from the campus AWS is already developing, nearer to Danville.
- That would sit alongside a 1,000-acre campus AWS is already building in New Florence — eight buildings in phase one, with "a further 13 buildings of a similar size" possible in phase two. "In June of this year, the company said it would invest $10 billion in the campus."
- Nothing is committed: "AWS has not yet acquired the property", no construction date is set, and the company "is planning to begin sometime between 2027 and 2029 should the project be approved". Separately, AWS held an open house on a possible Posey County, Indiana project that "remains early in the planning phase", with CenterPoint Energy's excess grid capacity cited as part of the appeal.
- Reuters reports Amazon chief executive Andy Jassy saying "2027 is largely sold out" and "A good chunk of 2028 is sold out", with Amazon keeping some capacity in reserve: "We always leave a certain amount for on demand and our inference service bedrock."
- Reuters notes Amazon said earlier this year it would spend about $220 billion in capital expenditure for 2026, and quotes Jassy saying the company "could invest a lot more and it wouldn't be a bad use of capital".
- Forward-booked cloud capacity is the clearest signal available of how much AI compute demand is already contracted rather than forecast, and Jassy is describing two years of it as committed.
- These are the CEO's own characterisations with no unit figures, contract values or customer names attached, made in a podcast interview rather than a filing. We read the Reuters wire through a syndication partner; no independent confirmation of the sold-out claim is available.
- The Register reports four donations landing together at the Agentic AI Foundation: Alibaba's OpenSandbox, Anthropic's Agent Skills, Hugging Face's OpenEnv and OpenAI's Open Responses, taking the foundation to 10 projects. It launched in December 2025 under the Linux Foundation with three — Model Context Protocol, goose and AGENTS.md — and The Register describes it as "a vendor-neutral organization".
- Anthropic says it is donating the Agent Skills open standard along with the name and logo, the GitHub organisation and the agentskills.io domain, having previously donated the Model Context Protocol to the same foundation.
- Anthropic reports that more than 70 agent platforms have integrated Agent Skills, including ChatGPT, Cursor, GitHub Copilot and VS Code, that 1 million skills have been published and that nearly 280 million skills have been installed. The standard was published in December 2025 and Claude Code's skills launched in October 2025.
- Engineers from Anthropic, Earendil, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and OpenCode will govern the standard as a Technical Steering Committee, with David Soria Parra and Mahesh Murag as lead maintainers, and Anthropic says the first priority is a roadmap covering versioned releases, a formal proposal process and security guidance. The adoption and install figures are Anthropic's own and are not independently verified.
- Amazon Threat Intelligence says it "identified a PHP2Shell exploitation attempt dating to Oct. 17, 2026, in MadPot telemetry, four days before public disclosure of CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619." The attempt came from "an IP address associated with a commercial anonymization network," and Amazon says "it remains unclear how the actor acquired exploit information prior to disclosure."
- Amazon says the earliest proof-of-concept it saw on release day was "around 2026-10-21 0200 UTC," twelve hours before the embargo lifted, and that from 02:00 to 08:00 UTC it identified further attempts "from additional anonymized infrastructure" whose payloads and infrastructure choices "varied, suggesting these were multiple actors." It says php2shell "is now being broadly exploited in the wild."
- Amazon draws the general lesson explicitly: "AI-assisted analysis makes it cheaper to turn a patch diff or advisory into a working exploit. As a result, more actors can act within hours or even minutes once technical details of a vulnerability are disclosed." Its advice is to measure patch timelines for internet-facing systems "in hours" and to start investigations "from the earliest known exploitation, not from the disclosure date."
- This is Amazon's own honeypot telemetry and no other vendor has corroborated the 17 October attempt. Amazon says technical analysis is ongoing and that "it's unclear if any of these attempts would have succeeded in real-world systems."
- Amazon said it plans to invest more than €16 billion ($18 billion) in Germany in 2027, covering data centres and AI infrastructure, satellite internet through Amazon Leo, logistics and Prime Video production. It announced the figure on 20 October at the Invest in Germany Summit in Berlin, held by the federal government.
- Of that, Amazon says it plans to invest €4.8 billion in 2027 to expand its AWS Europe (Frankfurt) Region.
- Amazon says it has invested over €100 billion in Germany since 2010 and created more than 40,000 permanent jobs there, 3,000 of them at AWS, and is opening a second robotics and AI research lab in Berlin.
- These are company figures announced alongside a government summit; Amazon gives no breakdown between data centres and the other categories, and no capacity figure in megawatts.
- Amazon Web Services released TorchNeuron, which it says lets AI apps written with PyTorch run on Amazon's Trainium chip by changing one line of configuration, with no code rewrite. Amazon says about 85% of AI apps are written with PyTorch.
- The target is Nvidia's software moat rather than its silicon: CUDA's deep integration with PyTorch is what makes Nvidia hardware the default. Amazon says it will contribute code to the main PyTorch project to make the toolkit less automatically centred on Nvidia.
- AWS Annapurna Labs VP Colin Brace told TechCrunch: "Look at Deepgram — they moved to Trainium using native PyTorch support and they're processing 70% more audio per dollar at production-grade accuracy."
- The 85% share and the Deepgram figure are Amazon's. PyTorch users can already port to AMD and Apple silicon with a configuration change, and TechCrunch reports no independent benchmark of TorchNeuron.
- In a blog post reported by TechCrunch, AWS CEO Matt Garman says that "Over the past three years, Amazon has contributed more than $1 billion to communities across the U.S. in which we have a meaningful data center presence", and that "there are more than 100 data center moratoriums currently being considered across the United States". He warns that if they are enacted "the U.S. could be writing its own losing ticket to this race, and the consequences would last generations."
- On water, Garman says direct data centre consumption is "0.5% of all industrial water usage in the United States", "orders of magnitude less than golf courses, almond farming, and many other industries". On emissions, TechCrunch notes a planned Amazon data centre in Texas "is permitted to release 33 million tons of carbon dioxide per year, which is more than any other power plant in the United States"; Garman's answer is that generators "are idle 99.9% of the time (they run roughly 10 hours per year, mostly for required maintenance testing)".
- This is the fullest set of figures Amazon has put behind the data-centre backlash we covered on 3 October, when AWS said it had stopped using non-disclosure agreements with government agencies on data centre projects.
- Every figure is Amazon's own and none is independently audited; the water comparison is a share of industrial use, not of total water use. TechCrunch's counterpoints: New York announced a one-year moratorium on permits for large data centres, and "an independent watchdog said recently data centers were the main culprit behind a 76% year-over-year price increase on America's largest electrical grid". We did not open Garman's post itself.
- In a blog post published on 2 October, AWS chief executive Matt Garman said the company no longer uses "nondisclosure agreements with the government agencies we work with on our projects", per Data Center Dynamics. DCD reports the move comes just over half a year after Microsoft said it would stop asking local governments to sign NDAs, and "just days after" Representative Jamie Raskin, Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee, opened an investigation into Amazon, Google, Meta and Oracle over data centre NDAs.
- Garman's own framing of the stakes, quoted by DCD: "there are over 100 data center moratoriums being considered across the country", and "there are widespread reports of various countries intentionally seeding misinformation in the US about data centers to trick us into slowing down".
- Raskin found that Amazon's former secrecy agreements prevented local officials from disclosing broadly defined "proprietary" or "confidential" information, and that Amazon has used shell companies to conceal its involvement in proposed data centres, DCD reports.
- Garman's post did not address shell companies or opaque project codenames, and DCD says it has asked AWS whether those practices will continue. This briefing covered Amazon's $1bn "Built Together" community pledge yesterday; the NDA withdrawal and the Raskin investigation are the new facts. We did not open Garman's post or Raskin's letters.
- GeekWire reports Amazon will spend more than $1 billion over five years in the US communities hosting its data centres under a programme called "Built Together," funding free community college, job training and energy upgrades, on top of more than $1 billion it says it has given communities over the past three years. Amazon also says it will stop using NDAs with government agencies on data centre projects, install lower-emission backup generators at new sites, publish energy and water use each year, and pay enough for power to keep local electricity bills from rising.
- AWS CEO Matt Garman wrote: "Right now there are over 100 data center moratoriums being considered across the country. If these measures are enacted, the U.S. could be writing its own losing ticket to this race, and the consequences would last generations." GeekWire notes Amazon is projecting about $220 billion in capital expenses this year, so the additional $1 billion over five years "works out to about $200 million a year, or about one-tenth of 1% of this year's projected capital spending."
- Local consent has become a measurable constraint on the buildout: GeekWire, citing Data Center Watch, says at least 75 data centre projects worth about $130 billion were blocked or delayed in the first three months of the year, and an Economist/YouGov poll in late August found 63% of Americans would oppose a data centre in their community.
- Garman's post also attributes opposition to "misinformation and outright lies" and points to "widespread reports of various countries intentionally seeding misinformation in the U.S. about data centers"; GeekWire notes PolitiFact reported last month that the role of foreign influence in that opposition has been exaggerated, with little sign the accounts reached a wide audience. The pledge is a company commitment with no published allocation by community and no enforcement mechanism.
- GeekWire reports that as of Sunday night, people trying to use Meta's Muse agent to shop on Amazon saw a popup reading: "Continued access by an unauthorized AI agent violates Amazon's Conditions of Use, to which our customers have agreed."
- Amazon's stated objections are that Meta did not tell it Muse would access the store, that the agent does not identify itself when it browses, and that "it appears to capture and store customer credentials". An Amazon spokesperson said: "Agentic third-party applications such as Muse have the same obligations, and we've requested that Meta remove Amazon from the experience."
- Meta has said previously that Muse "has no visibility into people's passwords or payment methods" and that credentials a user shares "go into secure storage, so Muse can use them without seeing them". GeekWire reports Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Sunday night.
- The legal backdrop matters: Amazon won a preliminary injunction against Perplexity in March, lost it on Aug. 4 when the Ninth Circuit ruled the user rather than the AI company accesses Amazon's computers under federal anti-hacking law, and the court denied rehearing on Sept. 10. The Muse message cites contract terms, not hacking. Amazon declined to say whether it would sue.
- Unit 42 reported on 18 September that in default AgentCore Harness configurations the built-in shell tool, which is enabled by default and runs as root, "reaches into the same memory space where credentials are resolved to plaintext", letting an attacker read them from the runtime process.
- The researchers delivered the instructions through indirect prompt injection hidden in HTML comments inside a support ticket: "a hidden HTML comment tells the agent to curl our recon script and pipe it into python3". They then extracted a JSON Web Token for an MCP service account and MCP server URLs, which could be replayed against downstream services without AWS credentials.
- The credentials taken belonged to operator service accounts rather than end users.
- Unit 42 says AWS closed the report as "informative" under the AgentCore shared-responsibility model, pointing to customer-side controls such as allowedTools scoping and egress filtering. No CVE was assigned and no patch was issued. Only Unit 42 has reported this.
- Generac's Form 8-K, reporting an event dated September 16, 2026, says it issued an Amazon subsidiary "a warrant… to acquire up to 1,693,745 shares of common stock of the Company… at an exercise price of $200.9266 per share", exercisable "on or before September 16, 2033".
- "307,954 Warrant Shares vested immediately with the remaining balance vesting over the term of the Warrant in multiple tranches contingent upon aggregate gross payments, net of certain offsets, received by the Company and its global affiliates from or on behalf of Amazon and its affiliates for backup power generators for Amazon data centers, up to a total of $8 billion." A long-term supply agreement was executed the same day, and "Initial deliveries of backup generators are expected to total $2.4 billion in 2027 and 2028."
- CNBC reports the warrants are worth up to about $340 million and that Generac shares "soared more than 40% in extended trading on Wednesday". CNBC notes Amazon took warrants for as much as $4 billion of Qualcomm stock a week earlier under a custom AI chip deal — the same equity-linked supply structure applied twice inside a fortnight.
- Portions of both the warrant and the transaction agreement "have been redacted in accordance with Item 601(b)(10)(iv) of Regulation S-K", so the vesting tranches beyond the first are not public. The $8 billion is a ceiling on payments, not a committed order.
- Data Center Dynamics reports AWS provided a status update this week on its Middle East (UAE) me-central-1 and Middle East (Bahrain) me-south-1 regions. On the UAE it said: "After a thorough assessment, we have determined that we are unable to restore access to the resources and data hosted exclusively in the mec1-az2 availability zone", while recovery continues for mec1-az1 and mec1-az3.
- On Bahrain: "The damage to our infrastructure spanned multiple availability zones and exceeded what our regional and multi-AZ services are designed to withstand. After a thorough assessment, we have determined that we are unable to restore access to the resources and data hosted exclusively in this region."
- AWS said it is "working on replacing the affected infrastructure and will provide an update on the restoration of our services in the coming months", and will share its Bahrain plans in early 2027. DCD reports the facilities were damaged "in early March at the outbreak of the US-Israel bombing of Iran", and that Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps claimed a second attack on the Bahrain region in July. AWS opened Bahrain in 2019 and the UAE region in 2022.
- Customer data held only in those zones is stated by AWS to be unrecoverable. Neither report gives a number of affected customers, a volume of data lost, or a cost.
- Help Net Security reported on 14 September that AWS has released the Deception Benchmark, a public dataset of "14,822 samples across 16 programming languages and more than 70 Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) categories", of which "9,695 are scored. These include 6,988 code-level and 2,707 environment-gated challenges." The deceptive samples place real vulnerability patterns next to controls that stop them being exploited.
- AWS evaluated "12 models from five providers". With direct prompting, Help Net Security reports, models "incorrectly flagged 41% to 99% of safe code".
- Asking the models to prove exploitability "reduced false positives by 17 to 74 percentage points" but pushed false negatives to "7% to 44%". AWS treats false-positive and false-negative rates below 10% as "a minimum bar for production use", and Help Net Security reports "None of the tested configurations met both thresholds."
- This is AWS evaluating models on a benchmark AWS built, and the accompanying whitepaper is not peer reviewed. Help Net Security reports the models struggled most with environment-gated cases such as Kubernetes network policies.
- "GAUGE: When Not to Trust LLM-as-a-Judge in User-Simulated Evaluation of Task-Oriented Agents" (arXiv 2609.12191, submitted 10 September, announced 14 September) is by Umesh Bodhwani, Thanh Tran and Kai Wei; the paper's title page lists Amazon. It measures 25 agents from six providers on the τ²-bench and SimulatorArena benchmarks against a grounded verifiable reward.
- The abstract reports a "satisfaction-success gap": "conversations rated satisfied by our blind panel are decorrelated from actual success, with 57.5% of them failing the customer's task, a pattern consistent across five rater populations, both benchmarks, and every subjective dimension we rated".
- The authors also report that the judge's ranking holds across a broad capability span but "loses resolution among the near-equal strong agents: this decision-disagreement rate jumps from <1% on wide-reward pairs to 31% on close pairs". They propose a judge-free completion bit as a zero-cost tripwire for truncation regressions.
- Preprint, not peer reviewed. The measurement uses LLM user-simulators rather than real customers, and the paper does not claim a figure for how often deployed agents leave real people believing a task was done when it was not.