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Tech News
Amazon reported third-quarter results that fell short of Wall Street expectations, citing a shift in Prime Day timing as a drag on sales, even as its AWS cloud unit grew 39.3% to $46 billion, its fastest pace in nearly five years. The company also gave a cautious outlook for the holiday-quarter sales forecast, and shares fell 7% in after-hours trading following the report.
In its latest quarterly earnings, Microsoft broke with longstanding practice and disclosed Azure's actual dollar revenue for the July-September quarter: $33.2 billion, up 48% year-over-year. That figure beat analyst expectations of $32.3 billion and exceeded CFO Amy Hood's earlier guidance of 44-45% growth, edging out Google Cloud's reported $30.7 billion for the same period.
Security researchers and AI models independently discovered two critical vulnerabilities in PHP, the scripting language used by roughly 70% of websites, in mid-August. The flaws can let attackers directly access a site's underlying file system or database, and Amazon Web Services says they are already being widely exploited. The NSA has advised organizations to take unpatched PHP-based sites offline until they can apply fixes, prompting many commercial and government sites to go dark this week.
President Trump posted on Truth Social that data center companies should strike financial deals with nearby communities, including paying dividends to residents or local governments, claiming this has turned unpopular projects into popular ones. The comments follow examples like a Pennsylvania developer's $10,000 household grant offer and Amazon Web Services' pledge of over $1 billion for data center towns over five years.
Amazon stock hit an all-time high of $284 on Aug. 3 after a strong earnings report highlighted by CEO Andy Jassy's comments on the long usable life of AWS data center servers and the resulting free cash flow. Since then the shares have fallen more than 7%, even as Morgan Stanley added Amazon to its top picks list and raised its price target from $335 to $350, implying 33% upside from Monday's close.
NorthPoint Development's planned Amazon Web Services data center campus, dubbed 'Project Hazelnut,' includes an offer of $10,000 in direct cash to every resident of Hazle Township, Pennsylvania. Despite the payout, residents are organizing against both the data center and the associated transmission lines needed to power it, according to PennLive reporting.
Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman published a roughly 3,000-word post on October 2 arguing that local opposition to data center construction threatens America's position in the AI race. He said $68 billion worth of data center projects were blocked in the second quarter of 2026 alone, and warned that roughly 100 pending moratoriums nationwide could cause lasting economic and national security harm. Garman also outlined Amazon's 'Built Together' program meant to offer more benefits to host communities and sought to rebut common objections to data center buildouts, including concerns about water and power use.
AWS chief Matt Garman published a roughly 3,000-word blog post asking local communities not to block new AI data center projects, comparing the buildout to the post-WWII national highway system. He said over 100 data center moratoriums are under consideration nationwide and argued blocking them would hurt US economic and national security interests, while dismissing concerns about electricity costs and pollution as misinformation, some of it allegedly spread by foreign adversaries.
AWS CEO Matt Garman wrote in a blog post that Amazon no longer uses nondisclosure agreements when working with government agencies to secure approval for new data centers. The statement comes amid a broader backlash over secrecy in data center development, including activist Erin Brockovich's complaints about officials signing NDAs before communities are informed. Garman also disputed claims that data centers consume excessive water, raise electricity costs, pollute heavily, or fail to benefit local communities.
Amazon Web Services released Strands Decider 2B, an open-source model built to choose between preset options and output a confidence score rather than generate text. It is small enough to run locally, launched the same week OpenAI unveiled a similar tool, and originated as a side project by AWS distinguished engineer Marc Brooker after he saw TypeSafe's Jev model.
Amazon Web Services has confirmed that customer data hosted in its Bahrain and United Arab Emirates regions was permanently lost following Iranian drone strikes on data centers six months ago. AWS said one of three UAE availability zones and all three Bahrain zones suffered damage beyond what its backup systems could withstand, and it remains unable to restore access to some resources.
Amazon Web Services has confirmed that customer data hosted in its Bahrain and United Arab Emirates data centers was permanently lost following Iranian drone strikes in March. The damage wiped out data across all three availability zones in Bahrain and one of three zones in the UAE, with AWS saying the destruction exceeded what its systems were built to survive. Amazon had already halted billing in the affected regions and spent six months trying to restore services before disclosing the losses.