Once a modest online seller of books, Amazon is now one of the largest companies in the world, and its former CEO, Jeff Bezos, is the world’s most wealthy person. We track developments, both of Bezos and Amazon, its growth as a video producer, the popular Prime service, as well as its own hardware, which includes the Amazon Kindle e-reader, Amazon Kindle Fire tablets, and Amazon Fire TV streaming boxes.
The company’s annual report no longer says it’s focused on “inclusion and diversity,” a line it included in past filings, as reported by CNBC. Amazon has already announced that it’s “winding down” some of its DEI programs, similar to Meta and Google.
In its Q4 2024 earnings release, Amazon said it had “the biggest Q4 for Kindle device sales in over a decade, with a new lineup of Kindles driving a 30% year-over-year increase in devices sold.” During the quarter, Amazon announced the Kindle Colorsoft, an updated Kindle Paperwhite and entry-level Kindle, and a second-generation Kindle Scribe.
Amazon’s earnings call is at 5PM ET. I’m curious if the company will discuss the potential impact of Trump’s tariffs.
[press.aboutamazon.com]
Donald Trump suspended a 100-year-old law this week that companies shipping online orders directly from China depended on. The de minimis exemption was used as a loophole by Temu, Shein, Amazon, and countless drop shipping operations. Check out my explainer below.
The company is amping up its fight against Amazon with a new frontier: ebooks.
The ecommerce giant will spend $16 billion building the two campuses in Jackson, MS — $6 billion more than what it originally planned to invest, according to state documents seen by Bloomberg. The biggest portion of its spending will go toward servers, fiber-optic cable, and other technology equipment, Bloomberg reports.
Meta, OpenAI, and Elon Musk’s xAI are similarly pouring billions into setting up data centers across the US.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy was “involved in the decision,” The Wall Street Journal reports. Apple, which pulled ads from X after Elon Musk made antisemitic posts, is has also apparently “had discussions about testing out ads on the platform.”
Its “Medcast” bit from over the weekend imagines Amazon’s One Medical trying a new approach to get men in for their annual checkups: structuring medical appointments like a bro-y podcast.
Sounds like hell to me, but hey, whatever gets men to get their prostates examined.
According to The Information, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy was annoyed by the costs of shows like LotR: The Rings of Power and Citadel and has pushed for the video service to be profitable by the end of this year. As Netflix raises prices, Prime is promoting shows from competing services and focusing more on live sports than originals.
Amazon’s betting that sports can more reliably draw audiences to the Prime Video service than new movies and shows, significantly boosting its ad revenue, according to multiple people familiar with its strategy.
[The Information]
Our tech overlords all have problems, and they want to buy the solutions.
Amazon told Bloomberg it’s making software changes and temporarily pausing commercial flights, but that it expects to restart deliveries once it pushes the fixes and gets a green light from the FAA.
The ultra cheap retailer giving Amazon a run for its money is piloting an ads system for merchants, The Information reports. Similar to Amazon’s system, sellers can pay for increased visibility in search results as well as display ads on Temu’s site.
[The Information]
Amazon’s AGI lead Rohit Prasad told The Financial Times that Alexa’s generative AI makeover still faces technical hurdles, including fabricated answers, reliability, and response speed, and will be relaunched as an AI Agent when sorted.
“Hallucinations have to be close to zero,” said Prasad. “It’s still an open problem in the industry, but we are working extremely hard on it.”
[Financial Times]
AWS chief Matt Garman says Amazon is already seeing the benefits of its massive AI investments.
The custom Alexa voice assistant for BMW vehicles was initially announced in 2022, but progress has been slow in an attempt to build it around Amazon’s more capable LLM-powered Alexa.
Amazon says its “LLM-powered capabilities” will start rolling out to select BMW models this year that allow users to “plan trips and navigate more conversationally.”
[www.aboutamazon.com]
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Verge Score
Amazon’s finally added a key feature to the Scribe, but it has a long way to go before it’s actually useful.
