Five fresh takes from Amazon's earnings conference call

You’re probably aware that Amazon  (AMZN) - Get Free Report reported impressive earnings for the second quarter last week amid strength in its e-commerce and cloud businesses.

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But here’s some news you may not know that came out in the company’s earnings conference call.

Amazon’s own semiconductors

The company started working several years ago on its own custom artificial intelligence chips. There are two on their second versions, said Amazon Chief Executive Andy Jassy. The chips are a “very appealing price-performance option for customers building and running large language models,” he said.

“We're optimistic that a lot of large language model training and inference will be run on” Amazon’s chips, Jassy said.

Amazon’s health services

“We're pleased with Amazon Pharmacy doubling its active customers in the past year,” Jassy said. “And we're pleased with the response to RxPass, which enables Prime members to receive all of their eligible generic medications for just $5 a month and have them delivered free to their door.”

The primary-care service One Medical has been part of Amazon for just a few months, “and we're encouraged by what we're seeing there, too,” he said.

Amazon Business

The $35 billion annual pace of revenue for Amazon Business, its marketplace for businesses, represents “pretty strong growth,” Jassy said.

“The team is working hard to build a $100 billion-plus business over time. … For the bigger procurement workloads, there are certain features that you need to make” the service easier to use. “So, we have a lot of features that we're adding,” Jassy said.

Monetizing AI

“We have had a very significant amount of business in AWS [Amazon Web Services, its cloud unit] driven by machine learning and AI for several years,” Jassy said.

“Customers have been doing a lot of machine learning training and then running their models and production on top of AWS and our compute instances.”

Also there are “20-plus machine learning services that we've had out there for a few years. I think when you're talking about the big potential explosion in generative AI, we're in the very early stages.”

Amazon Fresh

Amazon Fresh is the company’s grocery retailer. “We have spent a lot of time thinking how we want the [store] formats to look,” Jassy said. “And we've just started rolling out some of those.”

The changes include an addition of well-known third-party brands, such as Krispy Kreme  (DNUT) - Get Free Report doughnuts, Jassy said.

Also, there’s a “refined decor in the stores,” he said. The stores feature dash cards that keep a running tally of customers’ bills, and there are “refined” self-service checkouts, Jassy said.

The author of this story owns Amazon shares.