United Launch Alliance announced Wednesday it plans to return its Vulcan rocket to service on November 13, nine months after a solid rocket booster anomaly threw the company's 2026 launch schedule into oblivion.
The return-to-flight mission will launch 40 satellites for the Amazon Leo broadband constellation, the first of 38 Vulcan flights Amazon has booked to deploy the bulk of its network. The mission will lift off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, and ULA said the launch date is pending range approval.
The launch is critical for ULA after its new flagship rocket suffered nozzle failures on its solid rocket boosters on two of its first four missions, most recently during a flight in February. In both cases, the rocket overcame the nozzle failure and completed its mission, but officials at the US Space Force, ULA's primary customer, lost confidence in Vulcan.
© United Launch Alliance
Since debuting in 2019, Amazon's Echo Studio targeted users who wanted superior audio quality from their Alexa-based smart speaker. The latest Echo Studio adds another less-expected differentiator: an integrated camera.
The Echo Studio with Home Camera, released alongside a pile of other Alexa devices today, doesn’t have many audio upgrades over the standard Echo Studio. Each speaker has one 3.75-inch high-excursion woofer and three full-range drivers. They both support Dolby Atmos and Amazon’s proprietary algorithm for adding a surround sound-like effect to stereo audio. Per the devices’ product pages, the speakers have lossless HD audio, Advanced Room Adaptation, and features for fighting noise distortion. Amazon announced the Advanced Room Adaptaion today, saying that the feature “continuously tunes the sound to your space, automatically adapting to the room's acoustics.”
Both speakers have four-microphone arrays and the same AZ3 Pro processor that Amazon introduced a year ago. The processor has an AI accelerator for using Amazon's Alexa+ generative AI chatbot.
© Amazon
Hot on the heels of Apple’s HomeView launch, Amazon has unveiled a massive 16-inch Echo Show and updated the Echo Studio with a built-in camera. Both devices are worth your attention as they aim to make Alexa more useful around the home, whether you want to manage connected gadgets, monitor your living room, or keep your daily schedule organized. The new Echo Studio and Echo Show lean on the latest Alexa with natural conversations and the ability to handle complex, multistep requests.
Amazon reports third-quarter earnings Thursday afternoon with more demand for its cloud services than it can serve, driven by AI labs such as Anthropic and OpenAI along with growth in its traditional cloud business.
One big question for Wall Street going into the report is what Amazon might signal about next year’s spending as it tries to keep up with that demand.
CEO Andy Jassy said on an Andreessen Horowitz podcast last week that AWS capacity is largely booked for this year and next, along with “a good chunk of ’28.”
Amazon has said it expects to spend about $220 billion on capital expenditures this year, largely on AI and cloud infrastructure, up from its earlier plan of $200 billion. Even at that level, Jassy said, Amazon is “leaving a meaningful amount of demand on the table.”
Past spending pushed Amazon’s free cash flow to negative $7.6 billion for the 12 months ending in June, as the cost to add data centers, chips and other equipment exceeded the cash its operations brought in. Jassy gave no indication of slowing down, saying the company “could invest a lot more and it wouldn’t be a bad use of capital.”
Core numbers: Analysts expect revenue of about $202 billion, up 12% from a year ago, according to Yahoo Finance. That’s at the top of Amazon’s own forecast of $197 billion to $202 billion.
Analysts expect earnings of $1.96 per share, about the same as a year ago.
Amazon’s sales growth will likely look slower this time, about 12%, down from 20% last quarter. A big reason is timing. Prime Day, the company’s biggest sales event of the year, fell in the second quarter this year, rather than the third quarter as it did last year, so this quarter is up against a tougher comparison.
Amazon estimated in July that the shift would take nearly 4 percentage points off its growth rate this quarter. It hits online store sales hardest: analysts expect them to grow only about 3%, according to Zacks.
AWS: Amazon Web Services, the company’s cloud business, generates the majority of its operating profit. AWS revenue grew 37% to $42.2 billion in the second quarter, its fastest pace since 2021 and the fifth straight quarter of faster growth.
Analysts expect AWS revenue of about $45.4 billion this time, up 37.5%, according to Zacks. Wedbush is more optimistic, projecting growth of about 41%.
AWS had $496 billion in signed contracts it hadn’t yet delivered as of June, more than double the year before. That means its growth depends largely on how quickly Amazon can bring new data centers online.
“Capacity, not demand, is the constraint,” Yorkville Ives analyst Dan Ives wrote of the industry in a note Sunday.
Jassy said on the a16z podcast that running AI models is still “an order of magnitude too expensive” for businesses to use them widely, and that Amazon’s custom chips, including its Trainium AI processors, are a big piece of bringing that cost down. Amazon said in July that its chip business was on pace for more than $25 billion in annual revenue.
Anthropic stake: Amazon’s reported earnings could look very different. That’s because its profit fluctuates significantly depending on the value of its stake in Anthropic.
Last quarter, $53.4 billion in pre-tax gains, mostly on Anthropic, pushed Amazon’s earnings to $5.75 per share, against expectations of $1.82.
Anthropic filed paperwork Monday for a planned IPO on the Nasdaq. Amazon’s stake in the AI company was valued at about $190 billion as of June 30, according to Amazon’s latest quarterly filing. That includes about $92 billion in gains on convertible notes, a form of loan that turns into stock, which haven’t yet been counted in Amazon’s profit. Those notes would convert to Anthropic stock when it goes public.
Anthropic is also one of Amazon’s biggest cloud customers. Its IPO filing shows commitments to spend at least $110 billion on Amazon’s computing capacity into the 2030s, behind the $114.5 billion it committed to Google, as GeekWire reported Tuesday. Anthropic also said in the filing that it has asked its cloud providers for more computing power than they were willing to supply.
Shopping agents: Amazon blocked Meta’s new Muse AI agent from its store last month, escalating a fight over who controls the customer relationship when software does the buying. Amazon said Muse broke its rule requiring agents to identify themselves.
Agents that shop on a customer’s behalf could bypass Amazon’s advertising business, which depends on people browsing its pages. Ad revenue grew 26% to $19.8 billion last quarter, and analysts expect about $20.8 billion this time, up 18%, according to Zacks.
“Investor questions remain on agentic commerce risk, particularly to advertising, but we see limited risk,” Wedbush analyst Ygal Arounian wrote in an Oct. 16 note, citing Amazon’s logistics advantage and its role connecting shoppers with sellers.
Amazon is trying to give shoppers fewer reasons to look elsewhere. It now lists 250 million products sold on other retailers’ sites, about 2.5 times as many as in March, The Information reported Wednesday. On the seller side, Amazon opened its tools to outside AI agents in September, starting with Anthropic’s Claude.
Cloud rivals: Microsoft and Alphabet report quarterly results Wednesday afternoon, a day before Amazon. Microsoft’s report is its first under a new structure that breaks out Azure cloud revenue every quarter.
Check back with GeekWire on Thursday afternoon for coverage.
Anthropic’s IPO filing reads like a ledger of who’s getting paid in the AI boom. The Seattle region’s tech giants are on the list, but they aren’t at the top.
The prospectus, filed Monday with the Securities and Exchange Commission, details more than $750 billion in computing deals, including firm commitments and estimated future spending, and offers clues about what its founders and biggest investors stand to gain ahead of the company’s planned Nasdaq listing under the ticker ANT.
Amazon and Microsoft have invested billions in Anthropic and won high-profile spending commitments from the Claude maker. But both trail Google, chipmaker Broadcom and Elon Musk’s SpaceX in their shares of Anthropic’s planned spending on computing power, the filing shows.
Following the compute money: Google’s chips are the biggest winner. Anthropic has lined up roughly $400 billion in computing capacity, mostly over the next seven years, based on Google-designed AI chips, known as tensor processing units or TPUs.
That total includes $114.5 billion to Google directly through July 2033, $161.2 billion in equipment leases with chipmaker Broadcom, and an estimated $125 billion to $150 billion in additional TPU capacity from 2028 to 2031.
Broadcom’s leases are the largest single arrangement in the filing. The five-year leases provide TPU-based hardware for data centers operated by other companies on Anthropic’s behalf.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX is next. Anthropic agreed to spend up to $120.5 billion through 2029 for computing capacity from SpaceX’s AI subsidiary, formerly known as xAI, which runs a rival AI lab.
The filing says payments will reach about $3.1 billion a month once all the capacity is delivered, which Anthropic expects in December. The agreements run into 2029, though either side can cancel on 90 days’ notice after early 2027.
Amazon is still a big winner. Anthropic committed in April to spend at least $110 billion with Amazon Web Services over 10 years, through April 2036, and AWS Trainium is one of four chip families that Anthropic uses to train and run its models.
Microsoft’s piece is smaller, which reflects its later start. The company was aligned closely with OpenAI for years before striking its own deal with Anthropic.
Anthropic has committed to spend at least $44.9 billion on Microsoft’s Azure cloud from November 2026 through May 2033, the filing shows. That’s up from the $30 billion Azure deal announced in November 2025. The deal has been amended twice since, most recently this month.
Claude is built into Microsoft 365, and former Microsoft CFO Chris Liddell joined Anthropic’s board in February.
Two smaller providers have deals in the same range as Microsoft’s. Anthropic agreed to spend up to about $44.6 billion with Nscale, a U.K.-based AI infrastructure company, and about $41.3 billion with GPU cloud provider Lambda, both for capacity powered by Nvidia chips, according to the filing.
Will Anthropic need it all? Most of the commitments can’t be canceled, and the deals with Microsoft, Google and Amazon require Anthropic to pay “regardless of actual usage,” according to the filing.
So far, the demand is there. Anthropic’s revenue hit $11.6 billion in the second quarter, up from $787 million a year earlier, and the company posted its first operating profit, $974 million. It still had a $66.3 billion net loss, mostly from accounting charges tied to its soaring valuation.
The company says it has “consistently operated in a compute-constrained environment where customer demand exceeds available compute.”
Its compute commitments assume that demand keeps growing. Anthropic spent less than $2 billion a month on compute and infrastructure in the second quarter. The SpaceX deal alone is expected to cost about $3.1 billion a month at full capacity.
Paper fortunes: Amazon’s biggest payoff is its stake, which it valued at $190.4 billion as of June 30 in its quarterly SEC filing. That includes convertible notes with $6.2 billion in principal that Amazon valued at $97.9 billion. The notes would convert into stock, subject to a 12% ownership cap that Amazon can waive.
Amazon is scheduled to report third-quarter results Thursday, its first earnings report since Anthropic’s filing. The Seattle-based company has updated the value of its Anthropic holdings in each of its quarterly filings this year, so a new number could come this week.
Google put $10 billion into Anthropic’s latest funding round and can invest up to $20 billion more under a March financing deal. The filing doesn’t give ownership percentages for Amazon, Google or Microsoft. It says only that the three companies have each made “significant equity investments” in Anthropic.
Anthropic’s seven co-founders hold roughly 230 million to 245 million shares each, worth about $14 billion apiece at the latest private funding price. The company also gave its own Public Benefit Fund about 847 million shares, or 5% of its fully diluted stock as of June 30, worth about $50 billion at that price.
Anthropic could begin formally marketing its IPO to investors as soon as the week of Nov. 9, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter. It is aiming to go public the following week, according to the Wall Street Journal. The company expects the offering to match or beat the size of SpaceX’s IPO, according to Bloomberg. SpaceX raised $75 billion in June, the largest IPO on record.
Many newer Kindle models allow you to link your Kindle and Goodreads accounts so that the reading progress on your Kindle shows up in Goodreads. This was never the case for my old Kindle 4, and if you jailbreak a newer Kindle and read using KOReader, you lose the benefits of this native integration. Thankfully, I was able to use a KOReader plugin to get my reading stats to sync with Goodreads.
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