Best Buy's Social+ Platform Signals Retail Media's Off-Site Future
Best Buy Ads announced today the launch of Social+, a new offering that allows brands to extend their retail media campaigns to Meta's social platforms. The solution leverages Best Buy's first-party customer data to enhance advertising performance on Facebook and Instagram, with plans to expand to additional social platforms in the future.
With Social+, Best Buy is expanding its footprint into off-site retail media – advertising that reaches consumers beyond a retailer's owned properties – which eMarketer projects will grow twice as fast as on-site retail media through 2026.
This expansion comes just months after Best Buy announced its upcoming U.S. marketplace launch, further signaling the retailer's coordinated strategy to diversify revenue streams beyond traditional retail.
"Our world relies on technology more than ever, and no one understands customers who use and love tech better than Best Buy," said Lisa Valentino, president of Best Buy Ads. "We're excited to launch this in collaboration with Meta. With Social+, we've set a new industry standard that will help our partners thrive, boost their return on investment and provide more ways to measure meaningful impact."
Best Buy's expansion beyond its owned channels reflects a broader industry recognition: the upper limits of on-site monetization are coming into focus. Retailers can only place so many ads within search results or product browsing experiences before customer experience suffers. Accordingly, off-site advertising will have a growing influence on retail media's trajectory.
eMarketer predicts that off-site retail media spend will grown 2X faster then on-site ad spend in ... [+] 2026.
This move into social platforms is particularly significant given current retail media spending patterns. 71% of retail media spending currently focuses on lower-funnel, conversion-oriented formats like sponsored products. Only 29% supports upper-funnel brand-building initiatives.
Off-site retail media capabilities like Best Buy's Social+ offering could help brands achieve better balance in their approach to retail media.
Social+ leverages Best Buy's proprietary customer insights with Meta's Advantage+ shopping campaigns to drive revenue across BestBuy.com, the Best Buy app and physical stores. The solution aims to help advertising partners increase ROI through automation that identifies both existing and prospective customers and delivers optimized content.
A key feature is access to SKU-level data through Meta's Product Level Reporting Beta capabilities. This granular performance visibility gives advertisers more detailed insights into which specific products drive results, potentially improving how brands allocate their media investments across different items in their catalog.
Best Buy says the technology was developed in-house and is already available to partners of Best Buy Ads, following a beta test with select brands.
Best Buy's announcement follows a growing trend of retailers partnering with social platforms to extend their advertising reach.
Costco has also been building momentum in off-site retail media, expanding from its first campaign with a CPG brand partner last year to approximately ten different partnerships currently active, as of March 2025.
Pinterest has become another key player in this space. In a case study from late 2024, Mondelez's Triscuit brand worked with Pinterest and Albertsons Media Collective through a LiveRamp clean room. The six-week campaign yielded impressive results: 16% incremental sales and 19% incremental buyers by targeting Pinterest users searching for summer hosting inspiration and charcuterie board ideas.
In August 2024, TikTok partnered with Amazon for in-app shopping, creating a direct commerce integration rather than an advertising solution.
The relationship with Meta builds on Best Buy's existing strategic partnerships in marketing and advertising. In April last year, Best Buy announced a partnership that integrates CNET product recommendations across Best Buy channels. In 2023, Best Buy and Roku established a partnership to make connected TV advertising more relevant by applying the retailer's customer insights to deliver targeted content.
These partnerships, alongside Best Buy's upcoming marketplace launch, reveal a comprehensive strategy to build what CEO Corie Barry described as 'incremental profit streams' through both expanded product selection and enhanced advertising capabilities.
Best Buy's expansion into social media advertising underscores how retail media networks are evolving beyond simple sponsored product listings on their websites. As competition intensifies among the hundreds of retail media networks now operating, differentiated offerings and expanded reach will likely become increasingly important.
When viewed alongside its marketplace ambitions, Best Buy's Social+ platform represents another piece in the retailer's strategy to build more sustainable advertising revenue streams. While the marketplace will help diversify Best Buy's advertiser base beyond major brands, Social+ extends their reach across the customer journey, and opens up additional revenue opportunities for the retailer.
For brands, these developments create both opportunities and challenges. The ability to reach consumers across multiple touchpoints with consistent messaging and audience targeting represents a significant advancement. However, the proliferation of retail media options also creates greater complexity in campaign planning and measurement.
As retail media continues to mature, retailers like Best Buy that can effectively bridge on-site and off-site advertising while providing meaningful measurement capabilities will likely capture a growing share of advertising budgets.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
CNET
15 minutes ago
- CNET
This Corsair Gaming Keyboard Could Be Yours for a Cool $130
Gaming is an appealing hobby for a reason; it's accessible entertainment, on a console, portable gaming device or a PC. If the latter is your preference, the proper desktop and accessories can help you achieve a better PC gaming experience. For example, Corsair's K70 Pro TKL gaming keyboard is a great way to fine-tune your setup, and it's just $130 at Best Buy, a $50 savings. Amazon Prime members can also score this gaming keyboard for $130. The Corsair K70 Pro TKL keyboard has a sleek black colorway and includes gorgeous colorful backlights. It also has a wrist pad, so gameplay is comfortable. Aside from its good looks, Corsair's keyboard includes programmable keys and speedy response that can make a difference as you play your favorite PC games. This is all thanks to magnetic switches that power the K70 Pro's response times. Hey, did you know? CNET Deals texts are free, easy and save you money. The Corsair K70 Pro also has customizable per-key actuation, essentially allowing you to determine the touch sensitivity you'd like for each key. It's wired for direct connectivity to your PC and built to last through 150 million keystrokes. If this gaming keyboard isn't quite a fit for you, check out the best gaming keyboards list for other options. Why this deal matters This Corsair K70 Pro TKL gaming keyboard offers rapid response, customizable response times and an ergonomic design for comfortable gameplay. It's now $50 off at Best Buy, and Prime members can also score the same discount for a limited time.
Forbes
16 minutes ago
- Forbes
Neutrality Is A Myth: Generative AI And The Politics Of Everything
Artificial intelligence (AI), once discussed chiefly as a technological innovation, now sits at the center of a societal reckoning over truth, power, and the future of democratic discourse. President Donald Trump's impending executive order—reported in the last few days by news outlets as conditioning government contracts on whether firms' AI systems are 'politically neutral'—captures how generative AI has become not just a commercial or technological concern, but a flashpoint for ideological and epistemic struggle. The order comes in the wake of controversies involving Google's Gemini and Meta's chatbot, which generated images of racially diverse Nazis and Black depictions of America's Founding Fathers. These outputs were framed by their developers as counterweights to historical exclusion, yet were widely denounced as historical fabrications, viewed by critics as examples of 'woke' technology supplanting accuracy with ideology. Executive order written under torn paper. AI's , Bridges, and the Politics of Design The anxiety surrounding AI deepened when Elon Musk's Grok chatbot spiraled into an antisemitic meltdown, producing hateful screeds and referring to itself as 'MechaHitler' before Musk's company intervened. The episode demonstrated how generative systems, even when tightly supervised, can produce destabilizing and harmful content—not merely reflecting the biases of their creators, but amplifying extremes unpredictably. Such incidents destabilize public trust in AI systems and, by extension, the institutions deploying them. These dynamics underscore a broader truth articulated by Langdon Winner in his now decades old seminal essay, Do Artifacts Have Politics? Winner contended that technologies are never neutral; they embody the social values, choices, and power structures of those who design them. His most enduring illustration was Robert Moses's low-hanging parkway bridges on Long Island, allegedly built to prevent buses—and therefore lower-income passengers—from accessing public parks. Critics at the time dismissed Winner's argument as over-deterministic and accused him of reading intent where circumstantial evidence sufficed. Yet whether or not Moses's motives were as deliberate as Winner alleged, the broader point has endured: infrastructure, from bridges to algorithms, channels social outcomes. Generative AI, often marketed as a neutral informational tool, is in reality a deeply value-laden system. Its training datasets, inclusionary adjustments, and 'safety filters' reflect countless normative decisions—about whose histories matter, what harms to mitigate, and which risks are acceptable. Generative AI apps icons —ChatGPT, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Claude, and Perplexity — are seen on a ... More Google Pixel smartphone. The Algorithmic Newsfeed and AI Persuasion The power of such systems is magnified by shifts in how Americans consume information. Most now rely primarily on digital platforms—social media feeds, streaming video, and algorithmically curated aggregators—for news . Television and traditional news sites remain significant, but algorithmic feeds have eclipsed them. These digital ecosystems privilege engagement over deliberation, elevating sensational or tribal content over balanced reporting. When generative AI begins writing headlines, summarizing events, and curating feeds, it becomes another layer of mediation—one whose authority derives from fluency and speed, not necessarily accuracy. Recent empirical research suggests this influence is far from benign. A University of Zurich study found that generative AI can meaningfully sway online deliberations, with AI-authored posts shifting sentiment in forums like Reddit even when participants were unaware of their origin. This dynamic threatens deliberative democracy by eroding what is referred to as 'public reason'—the ideal of discourse grounded in rational argumentation and mutual recognition rather than manipulation. When AI-generated content becomes indistinguishable from authentic human contribution, the public sphere risks devolving into what philosopher Harry Frankfurt described as a marketplace of 'bullshit,' where the concern is neither truth nor falsehood, but the sheer pursuit of persuasion and virality. In this photo illustration, the American social news aggregation, web content rating, and discussion ... More website, Reddit, logo is seen displayed on an Android mobile device with a figure in the background. (Photo Illustration by Miguel Candela/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images) AI, Memory, and Manufactured Truths The dangers are not confined to subtle persuasion. A June 2025 Nature study demonstrated that large language models systematically hallucinate or skew statistical information, particularly when questions require nuanced reasoning. A separate MIT investigation confirmed that even debiased models perpetuate stereotypical associations, subtly reinforcing societal hierarchies. UNESCO has warned that generative AI threatens Holocaust memory by enabling doctored or fabricated historical materials to circulate as fact. And reporting by The New York Times has detailed how AI-driven bots, microtargeted ads, and deepfakes are already reshaping electoral landscapes, creating an environment where voters cannot easily discern human-authored narratives from synthetic ones. The Word 'History' is crossed out on a blackboard with the words 'Re-Writing History' chalk writing ... More underneath. This is for a learning about Re-Writing History Concept. Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. Consensus, AI and the Weaponization of Knowledge These technological developments intersect with a cultural trajectory that I have described, several years ago, as the 'death of the second opinion,' as public and digital discourse increasingly favors frictionless consensus over contested deliberation. Platforms reward virality, not complexity; generative AI, with its capacity to produce seamless, confident prose, reinforces this tendency by smoothing over ambiguities and suppressing dissenting voices. The space for pluralism—the messy, contradictory engagement that sustains democratic culture—is contracting. Even legacy broadcasters, which once offered starkly divergent perspectives, reflect this homogenization. News networks, despite their ideological differences, now tailor much of their content for algorithmic optimization: short-form videos, emotionally charged headlines, and personality-driven narratives designed to thrive on social feeds. AI-driven tools, which draft summaries and even produce full story packages, exacerbate this shift by standardizing the cadence and texture of news, eroding the distinctiveness of editorial voices. Simultaneously, institutions once regarded as neutral have become sites of contestation. In 2024, a U.S. prosecutor reportedly threatened legal action against Wikipedia over alleged partisan bias, raising alarms about state intrusion into crowd-sourced knowledge. Around the same time, a coordinated campaign on X, branded 'WikiBias2024,' accused Wikipedia of systemic ideological slant. These conflicts reflect a broader epistemic insecurity: as AI, social media, and legacy institutions all mediate public understanding, every node in the information ecosystem becomes suspect, politicized, and weaponized. Computer screen showing the website for free online encyclopedia, Wikipedia. (Photo by Mike Kemp/In ... More Pictures Ltd./Corbis via Getty Images) AI and the Mirage of Neutrality President Trump's proposed executive order must be understood within this fraught landscape. According to early reports, the initiative will require AI vendors seeking federal contracts to undergo 'neutrality audits,' produce 'certifications of political impartiality,' and submit to recurring oversight. While these measures echo prior federal interventions into private technology—such as the Justice Department's demands that Apple unlock the San Bernardino shooter's iPhone—the implications here are arguably broader. Whereas Apple's dispute centered on specific criminal evidence, the neutrality mandate would deputize federal agencies as arbiters of political balance in a dynamic and interpretive domain. The risk is not merely bureaucratic overreach, but the entrenchment of a preferred ideological baseline under the guise of balance. Any audit mechanism, after all, must be designed according to someone's conception of neutrality, and thus risks ossifying bias while purporting to erase it. The US Department of Justice (DOJ) headquarters building on January 20, 2024, in Washington, DC. ... More (Photo by J.) The impulse to demand neutrality, while understandable, may itself be symptomatic of what Freud described in Civilization and Its Discontents as the longing for an 'oceanic feeling'—a sensation of boundless connection and security, often tied to religious or existential comfort. In the context of AI, many seem to hope for a similarly oceanic anchor: a technology that can transcend human divisions and deliver a singular, stabilizing truth. Yet such expectations are illusory. Generative AI is not a conduit to universal reality; it is a mirror, refracting the biases, aspirations, and conflicts of its human architects. Recognizing this does not mean resigning ourselves to epistemic chaos. It means abandoning the myth of neutrality and designing governance around transparency, contestability, and pluralism. AI systems should disclose their data provenance, flag when diversity or safety adjustments influence outputs, and remain auditable by independent bodies for factual and normative integrity. More importantly, they should be structured to preserve friction: surfacing dissenting framings, offering uncurated outputs alongside polished summaries, and ensuring that a 'second opinion' remains visible in digital spaces. Democracy cannot survive on curated consensus or algorithmic fluency alone. It cannot endure if truth itself becomes a casualty of convenience, reduced to whichever narrative is most seamless or viral. The stakes are not abstract: as UNESCO has warned, when the integrity of pivotal histories is compromised, the very notion of shared truth—and the moral lessons it imparts—begins to erode. Democracy does not thrive on sanitized agreement but on tension: the clash of perspectives, the contest over competing narratives, and the collective pursuit of facts, however uncomfortable. As generative AI becomes the primary lens through which most people access knowledge—often distilled to prompts like, 'Grok, did this really happen? I don't think it did, but explain the controversy around this issue using only sources in a specific language'—the challenge is not whether these systems can feign neutrality. It is whether we can design them to actively safeguard truth, ensuring that pluralism, contestation, and the arduous work of deliberation remain immovable foundations for both history and democracy.
CNBC
an hour ago
- CNBC
Wall Street is upbeat on tech megacaps, but big questions loom on AI spending, China, Trump tariffs
In this article AAPL AMZN MSFT META TSLA GOOGL Follow your favorite stocks CREATE FREE ACCOUNT Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta Platforms Inc.; from left, Lauren Sanchez; Jeff Bezos, founder of Inc.; Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet Inc.; and Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Inc., during the 60th presidential inauguration in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 20, 2025. Julia Demaree Nikhinson | Bloomberg | Getty Images As Alphabet and Tesla get set to kick off the tech industry's second-quarter earnings blitz on Wednesday, Wall Street appears to be feeling good. The Nasdaq closed at a record on Monday, notching its sixth straight day in the green, and is now up 8% for the year after a rocky first quarter. But what happens over the next 10 days will likely determine whether the rally has legs. Following Wednesday's earnings announcements, the rest of the megacaps issue results next week, except for Nvidia , which should report in late August. Meta and Microsoft report earnings next Wednesday, with Amazon and Apple set to follow a day later. Last reporting period, investors worried about the strain of hefty tariffs on technology businesses and on whether big gambles on artificial intelligence would lead to returns for shareholders, or were signs of an inflating bubble. Three months later, stocks have bounced back, but the the industry is still grappling with the fallout from President Donald Trump's erratic global tariff policies and uncertainty over where duties on imports will ultimately land. Apple, Amazon and Alphabet all warned in the prior quarter that strained relationships with trading partners could weigh on profits, hurting product sales and ad spending. And the AI market has only gotten crazier, as tech companies show their willingness to pay astronomical sums for talent in addition to the tens of billions of dollars they're spending on infrastructure and model development. Meta's Mark Zuckerberg shocked the market in June, shelling out more than $14 billion to hire Scale AI CEO CEO Alexandr Wang and a few of his top staffers as part of an investment into the nine-year-old startup. Here's what investors will be closely following from the tech giants as earnings season commences. Alphabet Google CEO Sundar Pichai addresses the crowd during Google's annual I/O developers conference in Mountain View, California on May 20, 2025. Camille Cohen | AFP | Getty Images Alphabet 's dominant online ad business took a big hit earlier this year as worries mounted that Trump's tariff plans could crimp spending. Those fears haven't subsided. Revenue growth is expected to come in at 11%, according to LSEG, which would be the slowest rate of expansion for any period in two years. Alphabet shares have just turned positive for the year, still significantly lagging behind the Nasdaq. Last quarter, Alphabet narrowly beat estimates and fell short on YouTube revenue. Its chief business officer also said trade policies would "cause a slight headwind" to the company's ads business, primarily from retailers based in the Asia-Pacific region. Analysts have suggested of late that the business may be back on an upswing, thanks in part to advances in AI. Deutsche Bank analysts noted acceleration in the second quarter, while analysts at Goldman Sachs said the company's search business is in the "midst of a multi-year transformation." BMO Capital Markets analysts echoed that sentiment, writing in a recent note that return on ad spend (ROAS) should be improving. "As AI monetization continues to evolve, we believe Google will increasingly leverage its over twenty years of AI initiatives to continue expanding ROAS for its advertisers." the analysts wrote. Cloud revenue remains another key focus for shareholders eager to see how AI tools are boosting a unit that's trying to keep pace with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. Earlier this year, Alphabet said it would shell out $75 billion to beef up its data centers underpinning its AI and cloud business. Then there's the Waymo business, which has been a major source of investment for years. The robotaxi service now operates in five major U.S. cities and its vehicles had driven more than 100 million miles without a human driver or supervisor on board as of July 15. Tesla US President Donald Trump, right, and Elon Musk, chief executive officer of Tesla Inc., during a news conference in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, US, on Friday, May 30, 2025. Francis Chung | Bloomberg | Getty Images Tesla remains the biggest laggard in the group, with its stock down about 17% this year heading into Wednesday's earnings report after the bell. Earlier this month, Tesla reported a 14% year-over-year drop in second-quarter deliveries, marking a second straight quarterly decline. Automotive revenue in the first quarter fell 20%, and analysts are expecting a similar slide for the second quarter. Tesla is battling competition from Chinese and other EV makers that are offering cheaper alternatives. With Tesla, the story always revolves heavily around CEO Elon Musk. This earnings call will be the first since Musk's public split with President Trump. After spending over $250 million to help propel Trump back to the White House, Musk in May ended his stint as a special government employee leading Trump's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), only to initiate a spat with the president over the multitrillion-dollar spending package he endorsed. Some investors may tune into the call to hear if Musk has anything to say regarding his current plan to build a new political party in the U.S. But most will be focused on the company's fundamentals and the many challenges it currently faces in trying to revitalize its EV sales. Tesla has long promised an affordable new EV model that could help it fend off the competition. Another big topic will likely be Tesla's robotaxi efforts after the company launched a limited driverless ride-hail service in Austin, Texas last month. While the Tesla Robotaxi rollout was seen by fans as a positive sign for the company, Bank of America analysts say it has "immaterial financial ramifications." Meta Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Meta Platforms Inc., during the Meta Connect event on Wednesday, Sept. 25, 2024. Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images Zuckerberg's AI spending spree has raised a lot of eyebrows. In addition to the hiring of Wang from Scale AI, Meta also brought on former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and his investing partner Daniel Gross, who had been CEO of AI startup Safe Superintelligence. Zuckerberg later announced the creation of Meta Superintelligence Labs, led by Wang and Friedman. And Meta's CEO said last week that he plans to invest "hundreds of billions of dollars" into AI compute infrastructure, with plans to bring its first supercluster online next year. Last quarter, Meta upped its full-year capital expenditures outlook to between $64 billion and $72 billion from between $60 billion and $65 billion to reflect more data center investments in AI and potentially higher hardware costs. The pressure is on Zuckerberg to show results, or at least offer a clear strategy that investors can support. "While the recent talent hires and focus in this area are notable — and we expect meaningful improvements in models and user-facing applications — the road to platform leadership in AI remains long and highly competitive," analysts at MoffettNathanson wrote in a recent report. Analysts at Bank of America said they view Zuckerberg's latest commentary as "sign of confidence" in the strength of the company's business. Meta is expected to report revenue growth of 14.5% for the second quarter, according to analysts surveyed by LSEG, which would be the slowest growth rate since mid-2023, and Wall Street projects deceleration over the next two quarters. The Bank of America analysts wrote that Meta needs to "make a case for strong AI returns to drive multiple expansion." Microsoft Microsoft Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella speaks during the Microsoft Build conference opening keynote in Seattle, Washington on May 19, 2025. Jason Redmond | Afp | Getty Images Azure remains the focal point at Microsoft. It's the business that sparked CEO Satya Nadella's turnaround of the software maker over a decade ago, and is key to its ambitions in AI, where Microsoft has a tight but tense relationship with OpenAI. Microsoft's stock hit a record last week and is now up 20% for the year, about even with Meta and just behind Nvidia, which is the best performer this year among the megacaps. With a market cap of $3.8 trillion, Microsoft is firmly the second-largest company by value, trailing only Nvidia in that category as well. Analysts still see plenty of strength in Azure. However, Mizuho told clients about "one larger workload repatriation" during the quarter, which means the return to a physical data center. BMO analysts cited input from experts, who said President Trump's DOGE effort has "made it more difficult to close Fed deals." Amy Hood, Microsoft's finance chief, said in April that she expects 34% to 35% quarterly revenue growth for the current period from Azure and other cloud services. The growth rate was 35% last quarter. For Microsoft, which started its new fiscal year on July 1, investors also await fresh spending guidance. The consensus among analysts polled by Visible Alpha is about $99 billion. That would represent growth of 14%, compared with 56% expansion in the last fiscal year. Hood said in April that capital spending growth will slow. The company has already made cost-cutting strides this month, axing about 9,000 employees in its latest round of layoffs. Analysts surveyed by Visible Alpha see about $73 billion in operating expenses in Microsoft's fiscal 2026, which implies 11% growth. Apple Apple CEO Tim Cook speaks during Apple's annual World Wide Developers Conference at the company's headquarters in Cupertino, California, U.S., June 9, 2025. Laure Andrillon | Reuters Apple's biggest market may be the U.S., but the iPhone maker relies heavily on China and other Asian countries for parts and manufacturing for some of its most significant products. The company was one of the clearest losers from Trump's aggressive tariff agenda, which threatened to hamper global trade and hike the costs of selling products in the U.S. Apple shares have tumbled about 15% this year. Investors want more clarity on the company's strategy from here. In recent weeks, Trump has also held talks with India and Vietnam, where Apple has shifted some production in recent years. Revenue is expected to increase about 4% from a year earlier, according to LSEG, roughly inline with recent performance. Over the past four quarters, annual growth has ranged from 2% to 6%. Apple refrained from offering guidance last quarter, but CEO Tim Cook said the company was expecting an additional $900 million in costs for the period that ended in June. That was barring any changes to Trump's original tariff plans. The president lauded the company this year for its commitment to invest in U.S. manufacturing. Last week, Apple announced a $500 million deal with MP Materials to beef up manufacturing of rare earth materials in the U.S. Amazon Amazon CEO Andy Jassy speaks at a company event in New York on Feb. 26, 2025. Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images Amazon's second-quarter results will offer fresh clues into how the e-commerce and cloud computing giant is navigating tariff uncertainty. Last quarter, Amazon forecast operating profit for the current period that was weaker than Wall Street anticipated. It called out "tariffs and trade policies," currency fluctuations and "recessionary fears" as factors that may affect its results. Investors were spooked by the guidance, despite reassurances from CEO Andy Jassy that Amazon is well positioned to weather the levies and could even take share from competitors, given its ability to offer low prices. Amazon said the company and many of its third-party sellers stocked up on inventory in anticipation of the tariffs. But once that inventory is sold through, new shipments from China and other countries could face higher import costs. Cloud growth is another major point of focus for Amazon shareholders. Revenue at AWS grew 17% in the first quarter, which was below analysts' estimates and the slowest growth in a year. Analysts are projecting about the same year-over-year growth for the second period. Jassy said in May that the cloud business was constrained by data center capacity limits around power and components like AI chips. "As fast as we actually put the capacity in, it's being consumed," Jassy told investors. He added that the company expects some of the constraints to ease up "as the year proceeds." Amazon shares are up about 4% this year. — CNBC's Jennifer Elias, Annie Palmer, Jordan Novet, Jonathan Vanian, Lora Kolodny and Kif Leswing contributed reporting. WATCH: Google might be in the lead in their AI capability watch now
