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By Deborah Mary Sophia

Feb 5 (Reuters) - The pressure is on Amazon.com to provide on lofty expectations for cloud computing in its fourth-quarter results on Thursday, after Microsoft and Google's uninspired reports jolted investor faith in Big Tech's billion-dollar investments in AI.

Shares of significant tech companies rose in the past two years on the belief that enormous datacenter needs for artificial-intelligence innovations would power investment for years.

But that was before Chinese startup DeepSeek said it had actually attained AI advancements at a fraction of the cost, precipitating a selloff in innovation stocks that some state was overdue.

Still, Amazon may be better positioned than rivals to profit from more affordable AI, analysts say, due to its massive cloud company and lower exposure to pricey large-language models that power apps like ChatGPT.

Amazon Web Services, the world's largest cloud companies, is expected to publish its greatest income increase in eight quarters at 19.3%, according to data assembled by LSEG.

But Microsoft and Meta were both forced to safeguard their AI budget last week, and experienciacortazar.com.ar shares of Google-parent Alphabet dropped 8% on Wednesday after it said it would be spending more on capex than experts anticipated.

"Microsoft and Google results have actually put much more of a microscopic lense on Amazon's cloud growth," said Dave Wagner, portfolio supervisor at Aptus Capital Advisors, which holds shares in all 3 innovation companies.

"But if Amazon can crush it on their cloud numbers, the marketplace's going to definitely love that report."

The company was the first huge cloud service provider to welcome DeepSeek's AI models last month and has said its capital spending, mainly on AI, would be more than the $75 billion it approximated for 2024.

Slowing development at Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, townshipmarket.co.za the second- and third-biggest cloud players, has actually sparked some care from analysts about AWS' performance.

"Microsoft said it was capacity constrained, Google said it was capacity constrained. More than likely, Amazon is going to say it might have been capacity constrained as well and that's why its growth rate isn't quite as much as what the marketplace might have expected," said Bob O'Donnell, primary expert at TECHnalysis Research.

Some experts see the weak point at rivals as a sign that Amazon might have caught up in the AI race through efforts including doubling its investment in Anthropic and using a large selection of AI designs on its cloud platform.

"We in fact believe that AWS is regaining share. It had actually been growing a lot slower than Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud for an amount of time, however we believe that as Amazon has actually caught up on its AI offering, it might have less of a deceleration than Azure and Google Cloud," D.A. Davidson Luria said.

The business has maintained a higher appraisal than some of its competitors, with a current forward price-to-earnings ratio of nearly 39. Microsoft's forward P/E is 29 and Alphabet's 22.4, oke.zone according to LSEG data.

RETAIL STRENGTH

The e-commerce giant's outcomes are also most likely to gain from a healthy holiday shopping season, after rival retailers such as Target and a variety of garments business issued rosy forecasts over the past month.

Amazon's North American sales for the 4th quarter are projected to increase 9% year-on-year. After a downturn in online sales development previously this year, experts state Amazon is primed for a rebound in the retail business, bytes-the-dust.com which has influenced its post-earnings share movements over the previous two quarters.

Data from Adobe Analytics showed U.S. shoppers splurged online in between November and December 2024, spending more than $240 billion, drawn by deep discount rates on everything from TVs to toys.

The holiday costs growth rate of 8.7% nearly doubled from the 4.9% tape-recorded in 2023, historydb.date the data showed.

Amazon has actually likewise tried to improve delivery times and expanded product merchandise, including its concentrate on grocery, drug store and fashion - relocations analysts say will help move growth.

"Most signs are that it was a good quarter. There was a great holiday for the consumer therefore there's plenty of factor to think Amazon will have done well in that side of the business," Luria said.

(Reporting by Deborah Sophia in Bengaluru; Editing by Pooja Desai)