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by pgwhalen 126 days ago
> They literally don’t have the cash to do it.

I don’t understand this? Amazon is a profitable company, on the scale of tens of billions of dollars per quarter. They very literally do have the cash.

Am I missing some subtlety in their financial reporting?

2 comments

They have 86.8 B cash but are going to spend 200 B this year.
What is that spend compared against though? They already spend hundreds of billions of on various things in a year, but what is the marginal spend?

When you present these numbers alongside each other, you imply that they will go from making ~$20b/quarter to losing ~$30b/quarter, which is not plausible to me.

You can have a profitable business but be cash flow negative. Similar to how someone can have assets but have no cash.

Yes 100B in capex is unprecedented for Amazon (let alone 200). Last time they peaked Capex was at ~60B in 2021 when they decided to double their supply chain network.

So the marginal capex on gpus is likely 70-80% of their total capex

Yeah, a quick Google tells me that Amazon is holding 123 Billion in cash and marketable securities