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Amazon’s third-quarter results show AWS revenue rising 39% year on year to $46 billion, while the company’s free cash flow turned negative over the latest 12 months. The figures put a useful tension behind the AI boom: demand for cloud services is growing quickly, but building the capacity takes serious capital.

Aktualita.co reports that Amazon expects cash capital expenditure of about $220 billion across 2026, including data centres, computing hardware and networking. It also reports AWS revenue growth as the fastest in nearly five years. The same report says free cash flow was negative $42.4 billion for the 12 months to 30 September, compared with positive $14.8 billion in the previous 12-month period. That is not an operating loss: the company still generated $168.3 billion in operating cash flow, with investment spending weighing on the free-cash-flow figure.

Discuss: How much negative free cash flow is acceptable when a cloud business is growing this quickly, and what would convince you the AI investment is paying off?

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