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RNZ News
5 hours ago
- RNZ News
Amazon profits surge 35% as AI investments drive growth
By AFP Despite the stellar results, investors seemed worried about Amazon's big cash outlays to pursue its AI ambitions. Photo: 123RF Amazon has reported a 35 percent jump in quarterly profits as the e-commerce giant says major investments in artificial intelligence has been paying off. The Seattle-based company posted net profit of $18.2 billion (NZ$30.9 billion) for the second quarter that ended June 30, compared with $13.5 billion (NZ$22.9 billion) in the same period last year. Net sales climbed 13 percent to $167.7 billion (NZ$284.7 billion), beating analyst expectations and signalling that the global company was surviving the impacts of the high-tariff trade policy under US President Donald Trump. "Our conviction that AI will change every customer experience is starting to play out," chief executive Andy Jassy said, pointing to the company's expanded Alexa+ service and new AI shopping agents. Amazon Web Services (AWS), the company's world leading cloud computing division, led the charge with sales jumping 17.5 percent to $30.9 billion (NZ$52.45 billion). The unit's operating profit rose to $10.2 billion (NZ$17.3 billion) from $9.3 billion (NZ$15.8 billion) a year earlier. The strong AWS performance reflects surging demand for cloud infrastructure to power AI applications, a trend that has benefited major cloud providers as companies race to adopt generative AI technologies. Despite the stellar results, investors seemed worried about Amazon's big cash outlays to pursue its AI ambitions, sending its share price more than three percent lower in after-hours trading. The company's free cash flow declined sharply to $18.2 billion (NZ$30.9 billion) for the trailing 12 months, down from $53 billion (NZ$90 billion) in the same period last year, as Amazon ramped up capital spending on AI infrastructure and logistics. The company spent $32.2 billion (NZ$54.7 billion) on property and equipment in the quarter, nearly double the $17.6 billion (NZ$29.9 billion) spent a year earlier, reflecting massive investments in data centres and backroom capabilities. Amazon has pledged to spend up to $100 billion (NZ$169.8 billion) this year, largely on AI-related investments for AWS. For the current quarter, Amazon forecast net sales between $174.0 billion (NZ$295 billion) and $179.5 billion (NZ$304.8 billion), representing solid growth of 10-13 percent compared with the third quarter of 2024. Operating profit was expected to range from $15.5 billion (NZ$26.3 billion) to $20.5 billion (NZ$34.8 billion) in the current third quarter, which was lower than some had hoped for and likely also a factor in investor disappointment. - AFP
NZ Herald
9 hours ago
- NZ Herald
Book of the day: Not Quite Dead Yet by Holly Jackson
Holly Jackson: Preposterous but enjoyable tale. Images / Supplied Jet, the 27-year-old heroine of Not Quite Dead Yet, has a choice to make: she can die now, or die in a week. Someone attacks Jet when she returns to her family home on Halloween night. The way the blows land mean surgery has only a 10% chance of success. The alternative is an inevitable fatal aneurysm in seven days. 'What kind of choice was that?' the terminally flippant Jet asks herself. '[She] couldn't even decide what to have for breakfast most days.' Opting to forgo the operation and take the seven days, Jet is determined to solve her own murder. She wants to prove she can persevere with something to the end; that she wasn't 'born useless and would die that way, too', as her mother says about her when she gives up law school. That's the set-up for Holly Jackson's first adult novel. Her previous books have all been YA, with her first, the phenomenally successful A Good Girl's Guide to Murder, being followed by two popular sequels and turned into a BBC TV series. Jet moves out of the family home, escaping her mother's pleas to have the operation, and moves in with her childhood best friend, Billy. 'Poor sweet Billy' has always been in love with an oblivious Jet and agrees to help her find her killer. Driving around town in Jet's beloved powder-blue pick-up truck, their investigations lead them to suspect, among others, Jet's brother, Jet's brother's wife, employees of her father's construction company and the brother of a former boyfriend. The police, also investigating the 'murder', are always at least one step behind, and the sense of Jet and Billy being two young people against the world while the clock ticks down is nicely done. The grimness of the time bomb in Jet's brain is lightened by her ever-present smart-aleck humour: 'Smashing shit with sledgehammers, pissing [my brother] off, being an asshole because I'm dying and allowed to be, having guns waved in our faces. I'm having fun, aren't you?' Despite Jet's dire prognosis and much swearing, the novel feels more YA than adult. The grown-ups – and, tellingly, it feels accurate to characterise anyone but Jet and Billy as 'the grown-ups' – tend towards caricature. The book's setting of Woodstock, Vermont, was seemingly chosen for its proximity to the UK-based Jackson's American publishers and, despite the prevalence of pick-up trucks and rotting Halloween pumpkins on porches, is so lightly sketched it could be an anonymous town anywhere. Jet's major motivation for solving her own murder seems to be to show her family, especially her mother, that she can complete something hard, and this, too, feels more 17 than 27. But Not Quite Dead Yet is enjoyable. Jackson is not an astoundingly successful author for nothing. She can do pace, twists, snarky humour and pathos with the best of them. She makes you care about the prickly, wise-cracking Jet even as Jet's jokes get progressively more tired and self defeating: 'Come on, she was the one dying, they could at least pity-laugh.' The crime is genuinely perplexing and the efforts Jet and Billy make to solve it get riskier as the days count down, involving them in warehouse fires and precious time wasted in prison cells. Throughout there's the reliable fun of seeing these digital natives outwit the boomer cops with their technological know-how. The solution to the crime is, frankly, preposterous, but you'll be so caught up in Jet's race against time you probably won't mind much anyway. Not just for fans of A Good Girl's Guide to Murder. Not Quite Dead Yet, by Holly Jackson (Michael Joseph, $38), is out now.
NZ Herald
9 hours ago
- NZ Herald
Tech firms say deals for power give new life to nuclear plants at risk of going offline
Meta signed a 20-year agreement for the power flowing from a large legacy reactor in Illinois. Microsoft struck a deal to restart a reactor next to the one at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island plant that was closed in 1979 by a partial meltdown. And Amazon last month in the same state locked up power from a 42-year-old nuclear plant down the Susquehanna River. Tech companies are scouring the nation for other geriatric nuclear plants to power their AI dreams, according to interviews with nuclear industry officials and company earnings calls. Their interest is focused on the roughly two dozen operating plants in unregulated markets, which are in many cases free to sell power to the highest bidder. They make up about half of the 54 plants still operating in the US. The tech firms say the deals give new life to plants at risk of going offline or that have already been shut down. Contracts that lock in rates for decades are attractive to plant operators, and the electricity flows without directly generating new carbon emissions. Critics say Silicon Valley's nuclear spree will make it more likely that consumers will face electricity rate hikes or shortages in coming years as the US faces soaring demand for power - driven in part by new data centres. By locking up ageing nuclear plants instead of building new power generation, tech firms could leave communities to fall back on fossil fuels, extending the life of polluting coal and gas plants. A few years ago, nuclear energy struggled to compete with cheaper renewables and natural gas, but all power sources are now in greater demand. Contracts with tech firms can offer nuclear plant operators as much as double the market rate for electricity. Jackson Morris, a director with the environmental advocacy group Natural Resources Defence Council, said tapping nuclear energy allows companies to keep pledges to use carbon-free power, but 'doesn't do anything to solve for the impact they're having on consumers'. 'They're insulating themselves from their own impact,' he said. Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft declined to answer questions about which additional nuclear plants they may be seeking to buy power from, as well as the potential impacts of such purchases on other ratepayers and the environment. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post. All of the companies say they mitigate the impact of their energy use on other customers, by working with utilities to shield customers from funding infrastructure that serves only data centres and investing in bringing new clean technologies to the power grid. Tech firms say their data centres will eventually be powered by a new generation of cheaper but more sophisticated nuclear reactors, to be designed with help from AI. However, the technology has been stymied by engineering issues, supply chain challenges and regulatory hurdles. Google and Microsoft are also investing in fusion energy, which is even less proven. Controls, monitors and indicator lights fill the main control room at Three Mile Island last year. Photo / Wesley Lapointe, The Washington Post 'It turns out it is hard to go from all of that fancy new technology on a spreadsheet to an actual piece of infrastructure that isn't run with analogue controls,' said Ted Nordhaus, co-founder of the Breakthrough Institute, a California-based energy think-tank. 'Right now there is not much else to do other than try to squeeze every electron you can out of the existing nuclear fleet.' Chain reaction Energy companies that own nuclear plants are thrilled by the tech industry's recent interest, calling it a springboard for nuclear power's resurgence. New Jersey power company PSEG told investors in February that it is in talks with tech firms about selling large amounts of power directly from its nuclear reactors on what is known as the Artificial Island complex in Delaware Bay. Company chief executive Ralph LaRossa said in April that requests for new power from the utility by data centres has exploded over the past year, jumping 16-fold to 6.4 gigawatts, an amount of electricity that could power several million homes. In Texas, energy company Vistra says it is in talks with tech firms interested in buying energy from the Comanche Peak nuclear plant, near Fort Worth, and possibly others it owns in Ohio and Pennsylvania. 'I think we will see more large deals,' said Dan Eggers, executive vice-president at Constellation Energy, which owns or partially owns 13 nuclear energy complexes across the country. Constellation has already rezoned land next to the Byron Clean Energy Centre, a nuclear plant in Illinois, so tech companies can build data centres there. It is seeking similar changes at the campus of the Calvert Cliffs nuclear plant in Maryland on Chesapeake Bay. The company says it is also contemplating new deals with tech companies for long-term nuclear power contracts in Pennsylvania and New York. Lawmakers and regulators in some communities are concerned data centre nuclear deals could increase costs for other ratepayers and weaken the power grid. Some Maryland lawmakers want to ban Constellation from inviting data centre construction alongside Calvert Cliffs, which produces nearly 40% of the state's electricity. A report from the state's Public Service Commission warns that siphoning energy from the plant away from the power grid for data centres could destabilise the system. The Calvert Cliffs nuclear power plant in Lusby, Maryland, is seen in 2011. Photo / Jonathan Newton, The Washington Post 'In addition to being costly to replace a large nuclear plant, the quality of the generation … would be difficult to replace,' the report says. Unlike solar or wind facilities, nuclear power provides round-the-clock electricity when the plants are operating, in any weather. In many cases, nuclear power that gets redirected to tech companies would be backfilled on the power grid with gas or coal generation. Nuclear industry officials say the solution is not restricting deals, but building more plants. 'It is short sighted to say we will just ignore all this demand over the next few years and tell these companies to get their power somewhere else, when this could set us up for a lot of growth in the industry,' said Benton Arnett, senior director of markets and policy at the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry group. But even nuclear executives working with tech firms acknowledge that pulling zero emissions nuclear energy away from other customers will have an impact on the climate and can be out of sync with ambitious commitments tech firms have made to reduce their carbon footprint. 'A growing list of people are realising they can't have everything they want,' said Robert Coward, principal officer at MPR Associates, one of the nuclear industry's leading technical services firms. Critical mass The scramble by tech firms to secure more nuclear energy quickly has led Silicon Valley companies to some unexpected places. They include a dormant construction site in South Carolina, where plans to build a Three Mile Island-size nuclear plant were abandoned in 2017, after the developer burned through US$9 billion on a project that struggled with cost overruns and engineering setbacks. Local ratepayers were saddled with the bill. Federal prosecutors in 2020 secured prison sentences for executives involved with the project for lying to investors and ratepayers about its viability. Now, several big tech companies are among those that have expressed interest in bringing the VC Summer nuclear project back to life, according to testimony from officials at utility Santee Cooper, after it invited proposals for restarting the project. A utility spokesperson would not say if there are tech companies among the three or four proposals she said are finalists for a potential deal. Tech firms are also eyeing a revival of Duane Arnold Energy Centre in Iowa, a 1970s vintage nuclear plant majority-owned by NextEra that was mothballed in 2020 after a fierce storm damaged its cooling towers, according to company earnings calls. The repairs were initially deemed too costly, but data centres have shifted the economics of nuclear energy, and NextEra is mulling a reboot to serve the facilities. 'If we continue to see the kind of prices Microsoft is willing to pay for nuclear power from Three Mile Island, these type of deals become a solid economic proposition,' said Carly Davenport, a utilities analyst at Goldman Sachs. She said estimates show the tech company is paying as much as twice the going rate on the open market, and locking in for a 20-year contract. Duane Arnold is one of the last retired plants intact enough to restart. Many of the retired plants in the US have already been dismantled. But tech companies are finding ways to squeeze more juice out of active reactors in the ageing national fleet, pursuing reactor 'uprates' from federal regulators that allow increased output. Nuclear power companies aim to increase the power output of the existing US nuclear fleet by the equivalent of three large new reactors using that tactic. As more deals involving ageing reactors emerge, consumer advocates and environmental groups are growing concerned about the impact on everyday ratepayers and the planet. Amazon reconfigured its deal in Pennsylvania after it was rejected by federal regulators that expressed concern about the effects on consumer electricity bills. The company had proposed routing power from the plant directly to nearby data centres, allowing it to avoid paying usage fees for the electric grid. A caution sign warns of radioactive exposure on the turbine deck at Three Mile Island, which is being renamed Crane Clean Energy Centre. Photo / Wesley Lapointe, The Washington Post The online retailer last month announced a deal with plant owner Talen in which it agreed to pay grid fees, a contract that will effectively lock up a large chunk of existing power generation at a time the Mid-Atlantic power grid desperately needs more energy. The deal is notable because it puts an existing nuclear plant on sound economic footing for another decade of emissions-free power generation, said former federal energy commissioner Allison Clements. However, Amazon is also removing supply from the grid just as demand from AI and other uses such as electric cars and air conditioners is spiking. 'There isn't enough power on the grid,' Clements said, and the increased load forecast by analysts, utilities and grid operators cannot be met by existing power sources. 'There's not enough room on the system.'
