Amazon Quick’s new activity feed on mobile: the morning priority view, left, and the full feed. (Amazon Images)
Amazon is adding the Activity Feed and other features from its Quick desktop app to the AI assistant’s mobile apps for iOS and Android.
The Activity Feed is the signature feature of Amazon Quick. It combines email, Slack messages, calendar invites and CRM updates into one prioritized list, and lets people act on items (opening and responding to emails, for example) without switching apps.
Amazon said Wednesday that the Quick desktop app, released in preview in April, is now generally available on Windows and macOS. The company also said Quick’s agents now run in the cloud, so they keep working after a laptop is closed and deliver results to the feed.
The desktop and mobile apps now sync, as well, so a task started on a laptop can be picked up on a phone, for example.
Quick has a free tier, with paid individual plans starting at $20 per user per month billed annually, and business plans running $20 to $40 per user per month.
Quick is Amazon’s entry in a crowded market for AI assistants at work, competing with Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini, OpenAI, Anthropic and others. Amazon’s announcements cited business customers for Quick including Southwest Airlines, LabCorp and the PGA Tour.
The desktop app came together fast, as part of a new effort inside Amazon to use small teams to move quickly: Swami Sivasubramanian, the AWS vice president of agentic AI, told GeekWire in June that a team of about six engineers started in late January and shipped April 28.
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— Dave Levy, vice president of AWS Worldwide Public Sector, has left Amazon for a role at Google, according to Nextgov/FCW. An AWS spokesperson confirmed his departure; Google did not respond to a request for comment. Levy, who is based in Arlington, Va., was with AWS for more than nine years. He was previously head of U.S. government sales at Apple for 12 years.
Amazon first launched government-specific cloud infrastructure in 2011 and now supports more than 11,000 government agencies. In November, the company announced it would invest up to $50 billion to expand AI and advanced computing infrastructure for U.S. government agencies. That includes support for Top Secret, AWS Secret and AWS GovCloud (US), which serve classified and sensitive workloads.
David Appel, VP of AWS Global Government, National Security and Defense, has taken Levy’s role in an acting capacity, according to his LinkedIn account. Levy’s last day was July 31.
Kristin Hamilton. (LinkedIn Photo)
— Kristin Hamilton has been named chief commercial officer for Funko, the Everett, Wash.-based makers of pop culture collectibles. Hamilton joined from Crunchyroll, a division of Sony Pictures Entertainment. She was previously at Hasbro for nearly 15 years, leaving as the consumer products division’s head of strategy and transformation. Hamilton begins work Aug. 24.
Funko has weathered financial and leadership bumps in recent years, with a quick succession of CEOs and the accumulation of significant debt. The company this month reported a strong second quarter with increased sales over the previous year.
Laurent Reichert. (Coinme Photo)
— Seattle cryptocurrency company Coinme has named Laurent Reichertas chief compliance officer, consumer protection officer and Bank Secrecy Act officer. Reichert, who is based in Miami, was previously chief compliance and risk officer for the blockchain company Paxos.
In January, Coinme announced that it had agreed to be acquired by blockchain payments company Polygon Labs. Polygon said it would also acquire wallet provider Sequence as part of a combined deal valued at more than $250 million.
Reichert praised Coinme’s currency trading platform, adding that he looks forward to “the next phase of growth, both domestically and as we move into new international markets alongside Polygon.”
— DAT Freight & Analytics, a Beaverton, Ore.-based truckload freight marketplace, announced changes to its leadership team.
John Xiao has been promoted to chief technology officer, leading work on DAT’s tech platform, analytics and AI integration. He joined the company two years ago from Nordstrom, where he oversaw technology strategy in merchandising, supply chain and inventory management.
Marcus Womack, who joined DAT last year through the acquisition of his fintech startup Outgo, is now responsible for DAT’s carrier segment in addition to financial services.
Kary Jablonski, former CEO of Trucker Tools, which DAT acquired in 2024, continues to lead DAT’s broker business and is also responsible for marketing and customer support.
— Seattle’s Membrion has promoted Emily Rabe to vice president of technology. Rabe has been with the industrial wastewater treatment startup for six years, leading its intellectual property efforts and most strategic technology programs while also working with external technology partners.
“She has a remarkable ability to take on hard, ill-defined problems, learn quickly and put durable solutions in place,” the company said on LinkedIn.
The startup made two additional promotions: Ryan Flores has risen to senior scientist, and Michael Moreland has been promoted to senior customer success engineer.
Membrion spun out of the University of Washington a decade ago, has raised $40 million and is No. 154 on the GeekWire 200, a ranked index of the Pacific Northwest’s top startups.
— Microsoft’s Jordi Ribas has been appointed to the board of Sprinklr, a company helping global brands manage their customer experience, social media, ads and other marketing. Ribas has been with Microsoft for 26 years, currently as president of search and AI.
— Seattle biotech company Omeros has named Joseph Schocken to its board of directors. In 1987, Schocken founded the investment bank Broadmark Capital, now Tranceka Capital.
— Jay Carney, who served as Amazon’s senior vice president of global corporate affairs for seven years ending in 2022, has left his position as Airbnb‘s global head of policy and communications. He did not indicate his next role.
Microsoft and Amazon both saw their stocks surge again Monday, riding a post-earnings tech wave across the stock market that pushed Amazon past $3 trillion in value for the first time.
The gains follow earnings reports last week in which both companies’ cloud platforms exceeded expectations. Microsoft said Azure grew 43%, passing $100 billion in annual revenue for the first time. Amazon said AWS grew 37%, its fastest pace in 18 quarters.
Microsoft and Amazon are now the world’s fourth and fifth most valuable companies, respectively. The three ahead of them (Nvidia, Alphabet and Apple) are all headquartered in the Bay Area, although each has sizeable engineering centers in the Seattle region.
Amazon rose 4.6% in intraday trading to $284.15 as of publication time, after touching an all-time high of $287.20 earlier in the session, giving it a market value of $3.06 trillion.
Microsoft climbed 5.2% to $488.97, worth $3.63 trillion. Its rally began Thursday, when it added nearly $450 billion in market value, the largest one-day gain by any company on record.
The rallies came despite AI spending plans that have unsettled investors for much of the year. Microsoft went into earnings near a one-year low, after a $357 billion wipeout to start the year.
It’s all still coming at a huge cost. Microsoft spent a record $41 billion on capital projects last quarter and told investors to expect more than $50 billion in the current quarter. Amazon raised its 2026 forecast to about $220 billion from $200 billion, citing rising memory chip prices.
In one sign of the impact of the spending, Microsoft’s free cash flow fell 23% last quarter. Amazon’s free cash flow turned negative for the first time since 2023.
But cloud growth and other signs of demand for AI seem to have appeased investors for now.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told investors the spending reflects unmet demand: “Even at that amount, we will still not have enough capacity to meet all the demand we have in 2026, and I believe this dynamic will also be true in 2027 too. In fact, the demand we already have for 2028 is striking.”
This week on the GeekWire podcast: Microsoft and Amazon both reported quarterly numbers, and both stocks rose on cloud results that beat expectations. Is all that AI spending paying off? And in related news, Microsoft sees a rare annual headcount decline, hitting product R&D hardest.
Plus: Satya Nadella builds a Power BI dashboard out of an analyst’s research report, and touts it on the earnings call to make a bigger point. Jeff Bezos names Amazon’s chips business as the long-awaited fourth pillar. And AI House managing director Jacob Colker delivers a much-needed pep talk for Seattle tech, calling on the region to recognize and build on its strengths.
AWS CMO Julia White, left, and CEO Matt Garman at an event in April. (GeekWire File Photo / Todd Bishop)
Amazon Web Services revenue grew 37% last quarter, its fastest pace since the end of 2021, but the company is spending so much on data centers and infrastructure to fuel that growth that its free cash flow for the past 12 months turned negative for the first time since 2023.
Overall, the tech giant reported $200.6 billion in revenue for the second quarter, up 20%, with operating income of $27.5 billion, up 43%. That beat Wall Street’s expectations of about $196.4 billion in revenue, and topped the high end of Amazon’s own guidance.
Profits were $62.6 billion, or $5.75 per share. However, that included $53.4 billion in pre-tax gains, primarily on Amazon’s investment in Anthropic, which inflated the bottom line. Excluding those gains, EPS would have been about $1.95, above analyst expectations of $1.82.
Amazon shares rose more than 8% in after-hours trading following the report.
AWS revenue reached $42.2 billion in the quarter, a $169 billion annualized run rate. Operating income in the cloud division rose 64% to $16.6 billion, lifting AWS operating margin to 39.4% from 32.9% a year ago — evidence that the AI buildout is starting to convert into profit, not just revenue.
“AWS is booming,” CEO Andy Jassy said in the release, adding that the company’s AI and chips businesses “each eclipsed run rates of more than $25 billion.” The chips business, which Jeff Bezos called the next pillar of the company this week, was at a $20 billion run rate three months ago.
Amazon’s operations generated $161.4 billion over the past 12 months, but the company spent a net $169 billion on property and equipment — up $66.1 billion from a year earlier, an increase Amazon attributed primarily to AI investments — leaving a shortfall of $7.6 billion in free cash flow.
A year earlier, it had $18.2 billion left over for the prior 12 months, by comparison.
Free cash flow is what’s left after a company covers its operating costs and pays for things like data centers and warehouses. It’s an important measure of financial health, which investors watch closely because it shows how much cash a business actually creates after paying for its own growth.
Update: Amazon raised its capital spending forecast on its earnings call. Jassy said the company now expects to spend about $220 billion in cash capex this year, up from the roughly $200 billion it projected earlier, attributing the increase to the higher cost of memory chips.
He addressed the cash flow squeeze directly, framing it as a matter of timing. Data centers require capital about two years before servers can be installed and start generating revenue, he said, but once open, they can be monetized for more than 30 years without repeating that upfront cost.
Servers and networking equipment run on a shorter cycle, purchased a few months before going into service. Those take a little under three years to break even, Jassy said, against a useful life of at least five to six years.
He said most of Amazon’s AI capacity is now contracted for terms of five years or longer.
“We’ll spend a lot of capex and encounter free cash flow headwinds until these data centers come online, can be monetized, and we get a few years into these servers being utilized,” Jassy said.
Other notes from Amazon’s earnings release:
Online store sales rose 15% to $70.4 billion, up from 10% growth in the same quarter a year ago. It remains Amazon’s largest single revenue line at about 35% of total revenue, and it is the line most directly affected by the decision to move Prime Day into June, into the second quarter. Last year, the annual online sales event took place in the third quarter.
Advertising revenue rose 26% to $19.8 billion, up from 22% growth in the same quarter a year ago. It has generated about $76 billion over the past 12 months, making it one of Amazon’s fastest-growing businesses. Prime Day lifted this line as well, because the event drives a surge in spending by sellers and brands competing for placement.
Third-party seller services revenue, which includes commissions and fulfillment and shipping fees Amazon charges independent merchants, rose 16% to $46.8 billion, up from 10% growth in the same quarter a year ago. Independent sellers accounted for 61% of units sold in Amazon’s stores, roughly flat with recent quarters. Prime Day boosted this line as well.
Subscription services, which includes Prime memberships, grew 12% to $13.7 billion. The line has grown between 10% and 12% every quarter for the past year and a half. Analysts have been expecting a Prime price increase, which has not yet materialized.
Swami Sivasubramanian on stage at AWS re:Invent in 2023, with a keynote slide behind him. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop)
Amazon just broadened the role of Swami Sivasubramanian, the VP behind AWS’s agentic AI push, expanding and renaming his organization to include emerging technologies, and giving him a larger mandate to shape AI strategy and technical direction across the cloud division.
Sivasubramanian announced the change in a LinkedIn post on Wednesday, saying he will now lead the “Agentic AI & Emerging Technologies” organization, with an expanded title to match.
He described emerging technologies as “the work that doesn’t fit neatly into a team because it doesn’t exist yet.” It’s a type of work he’s done before, including formative roles with DynamoDB, now one of AWS’s most widely used databases, and Bedrock, the platform through which AWS customers access AI models from Anthropic, Meta, and others.
“When the industry is changing this quickly, it’s important to step back, pressure-test ideas, and see the big picture to help teams scale their impact,” he wrote.
Sivasubramanian’s agentic AI division has operated as a test case for running Amazon like a startup, with small teams shipping products in months that once took a year, as GeekWire reported in June.
He’ll continue overseeing the teams behind Kiro, Amazon Quick, and AWS Transform, while taking on new areas including neurosymbolic AI and a recently announced service called AWS Context, which builds a knowledge graph from a company’s existing data so AI agents can query it.
The expansion builds on moves already underway, including the hiring in May of former Microsoft security exec Shawn Bice to lead AWS’s Automated Reasoning Group, which uses mathematical techniques to verify that AI agents are doing what they’re supposed to do.
It also coincides with a broader reshuffling of Amazon’s AI strategy and teams.
Amazon laid off employees in its artificial general intelligence organization last week and confirmed the closure of its San Francisco AGI site, but noted that its frontier model research will continue under Pieter Abbeel, who joined Amazon through its acquisition of robotics startup Covariant.
Business Insider reported Monday that Amazon is winding down most of its in-house Nova foundation models, including its high-end Premier and Omni models, and concentrating engineering talent and computing resources on a smaller number of frontier efforts.
Sivasubramanian’s expanded role is separate from the AGI changes, and the two organizations operate independently of one another within Amazon. An Amazon spokesperson said the company’s commitment to building frontier models “is as strong as it’s ever been,” while noting that it continually evolves its model lineup based on customer needs.
The broader reshuffling mirrors a larger pattern across the industry, as big AI providers look to ensure the billions they’re sinking into chips and data centers pay off in customer outcomes and business growth.
Amazon reports quarterly earnings Thursday afternoon, facing the same test as every other big tech company right now: whether it’s generating enough business to justify its massive AI spending.
Wall Street expects revenue of about $196.4 billion, up 17% from a year ago, and earnings of $1.82 per share. That’s essentially the midpoint of Amazon’s own forecast for the second quarter.
Part of that growth is due to the calendar. Prime Day ran June 23-26 this year, during the second quarter in the U.S. and most large markets. Last year it ran July 8-11, in the third quarter. That gives Amazon’s retail numbers a boost this time that the year-ago quarter didn’t have.
Another factor is the cloud. AWS grew revenue 28% last quarter, its fastest rate in nearly four years, and analysts expect the acceleration to continue with revenue of roughly $40.5 billion for the second quarter, up 31%, according to Zacks Consensus Estimates.
The company plans a record $200 billion in capital expenditures this year, nearly all of it for data centers, servers and chips to support increased capacity for training and running AI models.
Amazon is making those investments based in part on demand from big AI companies including OpenAI and Anthropic, which have signed commitments to AWS worth $138 billion and more than $100 billion, respectively, for the coming years.
“We’re not investing approximately $200 billion in capex in 2026 on a hunch,” CEO Andy Jassy wrote in his April shareholder letter.
In the meantime, the spending is absorbing nearly all of the cash from Amazon’s operations. Free cash flow fell to $1.2 billion over the past 12 months, from $25.9 billion a year earlier.
Investors seem to be losing patience with that tradeoff overall. Google parent Alphabet beat expectations last week and its stock fell anyway, after raising its own capital spending forecast to as much as $205 billion for the year. Microsoft reports earnings Wednesday afternoon.
One difference for Amazon is its custom chip business — Graviton, Trainium and Nitro — which passed a $20 billion annual revenue run rate last quarter. Jeff Bezos said this week that it’s becoming a fourth pillar of the company, alongside Marketplace, Prime and AWS.
The company is overhauling its approach to AI model development. Business Insider reported this week that Amazon is winding down most of its in-house Nova models and concentrating engineers on a new frontier model effort, with a new flagship model expected at re:Invent this fall.
Amazon cut jobs in its AGI organization last week and confirmed that it’s closing its San Francisco AI site, while saying its frontier model research would continue.
At the same time, AWS is spending to help other companies deploy AI, committing $1 billion at the end of June to embed its own engineers with enterprise customers building agentic systems, following similar moves by OpenAI and Anthropic.
Check back with GeekWire for coverage on Thursday afternoon.
Amazon’s next pillar could be built on a foundation of silicon.
In a new interview with Fortune, Amazon founder and Executive Chair Jeff Bezos says the company’s custom chip business is on track to become one of Amazon’s most durable businesses, placing it alongside Marketplace, Prime, and Amazon Web Services as a core pillar of the company.
“A few of our offerings have become durable pillars, things like Marketplace and Prime and AWS,” Bezos told Fortune. “What I see right now is that our chips business, our silicon business, is lining up to be our next pillar.”
The comments offer one of Bezos’ clearest public endorsements yet of Amazon’s push to design its own chips for artificial intelligence, an increasingly important strategy as demand for AI computing soars and companies look for alternatives to Nvidia’s dominant processors.
More than a decade of investment
Amazon has invested heavily in custom silicon through Annapurna Labs, the Israeli chip startup it acquired in 2015. The company now develops its own AI chips under the Trainium and Inferentia brands, designed to train and run large language models while reducing costs for customers using Amazon Web Services.
AWS has positioned the chips as a lower-cost alternative for AI developers. AWS has positioned the chips as a lower-cost alternative for AI developers. Anthropic trains and runs its Claude models on Trainium, and OpenAI has committed to consume about 2 gigawatts of Trainium capacity, ramping in 2027.
The company disclosed revenue for its in-house data center chips for the first time earlier this year, and since then its Trainium, Graviton, and Nitro chips have grown to a combined annual run rate of more than $20 billion. Amazon has been pouring billions of dollars into AI infrastructure, including new data centers and custom networking hardware.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has repeatedly argued that demand for AI computing will remain strong for years, making investments in chips, servers, networking equipment, and power generation essential to the company’s long-term growth.
In an earnings release earlier this year, Jassy signaled plans to pour a record $200 billion in capital expenditures across Amazon in 2026, citing “seminal opportunities like AI, chips, robotics, and low earth orbit satellites.”
The real potential for Amazon’s chips business could come in going beyond the walls of its own data centers. Jassy wrote in his annual letter to shareholders this year that it’s “quite possible” Amazon will sell racks of its internally developed chips to third parties in the future.
Amazon’s fourth pillar?
This discussion about Amazon’s “pillars” goes back to Bezos’ 2014 letter to shareholders, where he described four characteristics of what he called a “dreamy” business: “Customers love it, it can grow to very large size, it has strong returns on capital, and it’s durable in time — with the potential to endure for decades.”
AWS, Marketplace, and Prime are considered the first three pillars. The question of what could become Amazon’s “fourth pillar” has been debated for more than a decade, with areas including shipping and logistics and Alexa cited as contenders in the past.
The company’s big bet on silicon also was emphasized by Jassy in the Fortune piece. He told the magazine that chips are often the key to computing. “The growth in AI has been so significant, but we have a chips business that we built over the last decade here that is growing very quickly,” he said.
The profile appeared alongside Fortune’s release of its 2026 Global 500 ranking, which placed Amazon at No. 1 for the first time, ending Walmart’s 12-year run as the world’s largest company by revenue after Amazon surpassed $700 billion in annual sales, as reported previously.
Walmart fell to No. 2, followed by State Grid of China, UnitedHealth Group, and Saudi Aramco. The magazine reports that Amazon is on pace to be the first trillion dollar company by revenue.
Amazon reports Q2 2026 earnings on Thursday afternoon. Check back with GeekWire for coverage.
A researcher found that anyone with physical access to one Shark robot vacuum can extract its AWS IoT certificate and use it to take over other Shark vacuums region-wide, with no patch yet available.
What does the cloud actually cost this month? Ask finance, ask the DevOps lead, ask the admin who provisioned half the instances two years ago – chances are good all three give a different number. That gap is not a rounding error. It is, according to Flexera's 2026 State of the Cloud Report, roughly 29 percent of total cloud spend disappearing into overprovisioned resources, idle compute, and services nobody remembers switching on.
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