Stoke Space announced Tuesday that it has raised another significant round of funding, $1 billion, as it makes a final push toward its debut launch next year. The Washington-based launch company also revealed plans for a larger medium-lift vehicle.

With the Series E funding round, co-led by Point72 Ventures and Spark Capital, Stoke Space brought its total amount of capital raised to $2.3 billion, a staggering amount for a company that has yet to attempt an orbital launch.

The quantity of new funding will enable the company to accelerate work on a larger "Block 2" version of the Nova rocket, capable of lifting 15 metric tons to low-Earth orbit in a fully reusable configuration, said Stoke co-founder and Chief Executive Andy Lapsa.

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Israeli satellite company ImageSat International unveiled a new Earth observation satellite on September 8 designed to capture imagery sharp enough to identify small objects on the ground from orbit, while processing some of that data in space before it ever reaches an analyst. The satellite, called EROS NOVA, will capture imagery at a native resolution […]

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.

FBI agents arrested a Florida man accused of spreading Steam game malware that stole $220,000 in crypto, including $32,000 from a terminally ill cancer patient.