Amazon burns $42.4B in cash and Reddit loses 1M weekly visits

Two companies reported growth yesterday and both were punished for it. Amazon's cloud accelerated to 39% and its free cash flow still went deep into the red; Reddit grew revenue 53% and lost a quarter of its market value because Google's AI search stopped sending it people. Meanwhile a government bought equity in its national AI lab, and a French company gave away a trillion-parameter model.

AWS grew 39% and Amazon's cash flow went to minus $42.4B

AWS billed $46.0 billion in the quarter, up 39% year over year and faster than Q2's 37%. Total revenue reached $201.9 billion (+12%) and operating income hit $28.1 billion. Management guided AWS growth above 40% for both 2027 and 2028.
But trailing-twelve-month free cash flow swung from an inflow of $14.8 billion to an outflow of $42.4 billion. Amazon bought $77.3 billion of property and equipment in a single quarter and kept 2026 capital spending at roughly $220 billion. Diluted EPS of $1.89 missed the $1.97 expected; the stock closed down 4.25% and fell further after hours.

Why it mattersAmazon is no longer paying for AI with what the business generates. When the most disciplined operator in digital commerce posts negative cash flow, the price of this race stops being an abstraction and becomes a number on the balance sheet. Andy Jassy's answer was ambition: "There has never been a trillion dollar revenue business, and we may have two of them in the next 5-10 years."

Reddit grew revenue 53% and the stock collapsed 23%

Q3 revenue was $895 million, up 53% and above the ~$875 million expected. Net income rose 74% to $283 million and advertising brought in $847 million (+54%). Revenue per U.S. daily user climbed 53% to $13.82.
And yet U.S. daily active users fell to 50.7 million from 53.2 million in Q2. Reddit said search referrals dropped by more than 1 million per week on average in October and warned daily users could fall by a low-double-digit percentage next quarter. The stock sank about 23%, and CEO Steve Huffman announced a shift to a mostly logged-in experience.

Why it mattersThis is the clearest price tag yet on AI search. The deal that built the web for twenty years — you publish, Google sends you people — is being rewritten, and the market just priced the loss of that traffic above 53% revenue growth. Anyone whose business depends on organic search should read Reddit's quarter as a preview, not an anomaly.

Canada bought a stake in Cohere for up to C$1.6 billion

Prime Minister Mark Carney announced the federal government will take an equity stake of up to C$1.6 billion (about US$1.14 billion) in Toronto-based Cohere, ahead of a Canada-EU summit in Montreal.
The investment is part of a financing round targeting C$7 billion that would value Cohere at C$35.7 billion. CEO Aidan Gomez said the company will stay rooted in Canada; the government is investing alongside private investors rather than replacing them.

Why it mattersA G7 government stopped treating AI as something to regulate from the outside and became a shareholder. That is a different theory of sovereignty: not rules, but ownership and a seat at the table.

Mistral opened the weights of a trillion-parameter model

France's Mistral released the open weights of Mistral Large 4, a model of about one trillion parameters, on Hugging Face and through its own API. It is positioned for detecting, analyzing and responding to threats across code and IT infrastructure, and can be deployed on-premises.
Mistral claims performance comparable to the Chinese open model GLM-5.3 while using 47% fewer tokens per task, and says Large 4 outranks every other open model on Artificial Analysis' Coding Agent Index. Its pitch against closed labs: with open weights, access "can't be cut off."

Why it mattersOpen weights plus on-premises deployment is the cheapest sovereignty available right now. You don't need a national data center to stop depending on a foreign API — you need hardware you control and a model nobody can revoke.

DoorDash is buying Instacart for $17 billion

DoorDash agreed to acquire Instacart at $65 per share, a deal valued around $17 billion. Both boards approved it; Instacart's market capitalization was above $13 billion and it has spent 14 years in online grocery.
The companies expect the transaction to close toward the end of 2027 or in the first half of 2028. Grocery is DoorDash's fastest-growing category and the gap this deal fills, with Walmart and Amazon as the real targets.

Why it mattersDelivery is consolidating because the unit economics only work at enormous scale. Two apps fighting over the same couriers and the same carts become one app with pricing power.

The big picture

Yesterday the market drew two lines. One runs under Amazon: AI infrastructure now costs more cash than the business produces, and investors are done applauding growth without a visible return. The other runs under Reddit: the traffic that funded the open web is being absorbed by AI answers, and a 53% revenue jump cannot compensate for losing the audience pipe. Against that, the counterweights appeared the same day — a government buying equity in a national lab, and a company giving away a frontier-scale model so nobody can cut off access. The pattern of the last 24 hours is not slowdown, it is a fight over who controls the inputs: cash, attention, and model weights.

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Topics:AI Big Tech Startups Regulation