Amazon Q3 Preview: How High Does AWS Need to Grow to Satisfy the Market? My personal baseline estimate is approximately $203.5 billion in revenue and $27 billion in operating profit for Q3, with AWS growth around 40%. Key points regarding Amazon's earnings report: 1. Sell-side benchmarks for AWS growth are generally in the high 30% range, but some institutions are already projecting even higher. A 40% growth rate indicates continued business acceleration and strong performance. Some funds had already prepared for a higher growth rate before the earnings report, and after the announcement, they may need to observe further: can Q4 growth be even faster, and will next year's revenue forecasts be revised upwards? 2. More importantly, how much are ordinary enterprises starting to spend? This is also a core point to look at when analyzing Microsoft and Google's earnings reports. I pay particular attention to customers outside the cutting-edge large-scale models. The reason is that the computing power purchases of a few model companies can quickly inflate order numbers. If enterprise software, traditional industries, and internet applications also begin to steadily increase consumption, AWS's future customer base will be broader. There is already some empirical evidence in this regard. 3. Negative free cash flow is highly probable. Of course, the market is more concerned about next year's capital expenditure and expected revenue growth. I don't believe that an increase in capital expenditure should immediately lead to pessimism. As long as new capacity can be put into use quickly and customers continue to pay, higher investment can yield reasonable returns. Therefore, the market needs more concrete evidence: for example, whether new revenue can keep up with the pace of investment; and how the utilization rate and profit performance are after the new batch of servers are put into service. 4. Retail and advertising are the cornerstones of the business; they determine how much profit the group has to support investment. See the full text on OKX Planet for details.