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Amazon is slated to report third-quarter earnings results after the bell on Thursday.

Here's what analysts are expecting, according to LSEG:

• Earnings per share: $1.96 adjusted
• Revenue: $202.31 billion

Wall Street is also looking at other key revenue numbers:

• Amazon Web Services: $45.48 billion, according to StreetAccount
• Advertising: $20.82 billion, according to StreetAccount

Investors expect to see robust growth in Amazon's cloud segment. AWS sales are predicted to grow 38%, according to StreetAccount, compared with a 37% gain last quarter. It would mark AWS's fifth consecutive quarter of revenue acceleration.

That momentum isn't expected to slow down. CEO Andy Jassy said Amazon's cloud capacity is "largely sold out" for next year, and it's received significant commitments for 2028 as well.

"We always leave a certain amount for on demand and our inference service Bedrock or EC2, but largely sold out all the big chunks," Jassy said on an Andreessen Horowitz podcast last week. "A good chunk of '28 is sold out."

Wall Street will be listening for any commentary from Amazon executives around AI spending.

Last quarter, the company hiked its capital expenditure forecast for 2026 to $220 billion, up from $200 billion. Analysts surveyed by StreetAccount expect Amazon's capex to creep up more than $280 billion in 2027.

Amazon has rushed to bring more data centers online to meet surging demand for AI computing power. The aggressive spending has eaten into the company's cash flow. In July, the company reported negative free cash flow of $7.6 billion for the trailing twelve months, compared with positive free cash flow of $18.2 billion one year earlier. It's expected to be cash flow negative in the current quarter, with an outflow of $9.9 billion, according to FactSet estimates.

Alphabet and Meta both reported negative free cash flow in their latest quarterly earnings reports. Microsoft said Wednesday its free cash flow declined 27% in the fiscal first quarter, but its cash flow remained positive, unlike its hyperscaler peers.

As Amazon shells out more on AI, it's steadily trimmed its headcount. The company has laid off more than 57,000 staffers since 2022, or roughly 16% of its corporate workforce. The job cuts have continued on a rolling basis this year via smaller rounds of layoffs.

The company on Wednesday laid off some staffers in its device software and services team to "operate more efficiently and better align with our product roadsmap," an Amazon spokesperson confirmed to CNBC. Fewer than 250 employees were let go as a result of the job cuts, the company said.

During the third quarter, Amazon made headlines when it blocked Meta's Muse AI agent from shopping on its platform. The company said it was not given advance notice that Muse would access its webstore, and it never agreed to participate.

The move is in line with Amazon's broader stance on third-party agents accessing its site. Amazon has blocked dozens of external agents, including Perplexity, which the company sued last year over allegations that the startup concealed its AI shopping bots.

Amazon stock chart.

While it locks down its site from third-party agents, Amazon has increasingly invested in its own tools. In May, Amazon rebranded its Rufus AI shopping chatbot to Alexa for Shopping.

On Thursday, Amazon said more than 400 million shoppers have used the assistant, and the number of people using Alexa for Shopping's agentic features has "grown more than eight times since the start of the year."

The tool now has more than 100 shopping-related capabilities, the company said, including the ability to build gift lists, manage subscriptions and handle account changes.

As rivals Meta and OpenAI push deeper into AI shopping tools, analysts have said the services could pose a risk to Amazon's digital advertising business. Users are turning to services like Muse and ChatGPT to research products, or in some cases, handing off purchases to AI agents, which means they're bypassing sponsored ads on Amazon's site.

"We expect Amazon to eventually develop its own agentic shopping offering, with its proprietary purchase data and commerce infrastructure positioning it well," Deutsche Bank analysts wrote in a note last week. "The key question is whether Amazon can accommodate third-party agents on terms that preserve attractive monetization."