Amazon reported strong second-quarter results for 2025, exceeding Wall Street expectations on both revenue and earnings. However, a lighter-than-expected guidance for the upcoming quarter and lukewarm growth in its cloud business triggered a sharp stock decline.
Investors, while impressed with the current numbers, are showing concern over the company’s forward momentum, especially in light of increasing competition in the AI-driven cloud space. On the other hand, if we take a peek into its sustainability goals, the retail giants’ emissions are still challenging.
Let’s study the revenue growth and the net-zero plans in the content below:
Amazon Tops Q2 Forecasts with Strong Sales and Profit Jump
- Adjusted earnings per share (EPS) of $1.68, up 33% year-over-year.
- Operating income came in at $19.2 billion, outpacing analyst predictions of $16.9 billion.
Despite this strong showing. The market now values the company at approximately $2.44 trillion.
AWS Struggles to Keep Pace in AI Race
Amazon Web Services (AWS), long the crown jewel of Amazon’s business, grew 17% to $30 billion in revenue. While that’s still solid, it fell just short of expectations ($30.78 billion) and didn’t match the high momentum shown by Microsoft’s Azure and Google Cloud Platform.
AMZN Stock Slides but Analysts Still See Upside
Reuters reported that investors are holding Amazon to a higher standard, especially as Microsoft and Google have both shown clear AI-driven revenue jumps in their cloud platforms. While Amazon is also investing heavily in AI, the returns haven’t yet wowed investors.
So far in 2025, Amazon’s stock had gained around 7% leading up to the earnings announcement. But after the company issued weaker-than-expected guidance, some investors pulled back, causing the stock to dip in after-hours trading.
Even so, market sentiment remains mostly positive. Analysts are still confident in the company’s long-term growth and expect the AMZN stock to recover soon. Many have set short-term price targets between $234 and $238 by the end of August 2025.
Meanwhile, full-year 2025 consensus estimates project earnings per share (EPS) of around $6.29. This signals faith in the company’s fundamentals despite short-term uncertainty.
Future Guidance Adds to Market Jitters
Amazon’s Q3 2025 guidance suggests net sales between $174 billion and $179.5 billion, a projected 10% to 13% increase over Q3 2024. The company also forecasts operating income of $15.5 billion to $20.5 billion, compared with $17.4 billion a year earlier.
Though these are healthy figures, they indicate slowing growth and rising spending. Capital expenditure for 2025 is now expected to exceed $118 billion—well above rivals—fueling concerns over shrinking margins.
Amazon’s Emissions Still a Big Challenge
Amazon says it’s working to cut its carbon footprint. The company has reduced its Scope 1 and 2 emissions slightly by utilizing more renewable energy and improving the efficiency of its buildings. These emissions come from its operations and the electricity it buys.
But Scope 3 emissions—which come from suppliers, product shipping, and customer use—are still going up. These emissions make up over 75% of the company’s total carbon output. As the company builds additional data centers and expands its cloud and AI services, these indirect emissions may increase further.
Amazon has promised to reach net-zero carbon by 2040. Still, some experts say the company needs to share more details about these indirect emissions and do more to cut them across its supply chain.
Electrifying Delivery Fleet
Amazon has aggressively ramped up its electric delivery vehicles (EVs).
- As of mid-2025, the company has delivered 1.5 billion packages using over 31,400 EVs.
- It also built the largest private charging network in the U.S. with 11,770 chargers across 50 delivery stations.
- In Europe, it is adding over 200 Mercedes-Benz eActros 600 electric trucks, expected to carry around 338 million packages annually.
Renewable Energy Milestone Reached Early
Amazon pledged to power all its operations with 100% renewable energy by 2025, but achieved this target two years early in 2023. Today, it matches 100% of its global electricity usage with renewables, primarily through wind and solar projects.
READ MORE:
- Amazon Leads Corporate Clean Energy Contracts, Hitting Record High at 100GW
- Amazon to Power AI Data Center Expansion with 1,920 MW Nuclear PPA from Talen Energy
- Amazon Expands Renewable Energy with 17 New Projects in Spain & First in Portugal
Cleaner Fuels and Smarter Shipping
In 2024, the company scaled up its use of cleaner fuels. It used 4.7 million gallons of renewable diesel, compared to just 286,300 gallons the year before. It also bought 3.7 million gallons of blended sustainable aviation fuel to cut emissions from air transport.
It also improved delivery routes. By offering customers smarter shipping options, it saved over 452 million delivery trips and reduced the use of more than 494 million boxes. These changes helped avoid an estimated 335,000 metric tons of carbon emissions in 2024 alone.
Making Packaging and Logistics Greener
Amazon is cutting emissions by bringing fulfillment centers closer to customers, reducing delivery distances and fuel use. It uses more rail transport instead of trucks to lower emissions.
In cities, it relies on on-foot deliveries and electric cargo bikes for short trips as well. This cuts pollution and eases traffic. The company also invests in lighter, recyclable packaging, aiming to have half of its shipments be net-zero carbon by 2030.
Expanding Carbon Removal Projects
While Amazon is cutting emissions through renewable energy and electrification, it’s also backing large-scale carbon removal efforts. These initiatives are vital for tackling the emissions that cannot be completely avoided.
It is investing heavily in nature-based solutions like reforestation, wetland restoration, and soil carbon capture. The company partners with trusted environmental organizations and developers to ensure these projects meet strict environmental and scientific standards.
Additionally, Amazon also funds early-stage technologies focused on direct air capture (DAC) and ocean-based carbon removal. These advanced methods pull CO₂ directly from the air or water and lock it away permanently. The company views these long-term technologies as crucial to scaling carbon removal in the decades ahead.
By building out a global portfolio of carbon removal projects, Amazon is not only addressing its own footprint but also helping grow the carbon market and drive down the cost of climate solutions.
Amazon’s Game-Changing Carbon Credit Platform
Amazon launched a carbon credit platform through its Sustainability Exchange to help suppliers and partners reach their net-zero goals. This new service gives qualified companies access to high-quality carbon credits. These credits come from real projects that either remove CO₂ from the air or prevent its release.
Unlike many carbon marketplaces, Amazon’s platform is selective. It only allows companies that set net-zero targets, measure and report emissions, and commit to cutting carbon in line with climate science.
Driving Real Change Beyond Offsetting
This platform goes beyond simple offsetting. It aims to enable real decarbonization across Amazon’s entire value chain. By offering vetted credits to customers, suppliers, and Climate Pledge members, Amazon unlocks new private funding for effective climate projects.
Over time, this platform could make Amazon a leader in corporate carbon management—not just logistics or cloud services. Plus, it encourages collaboration by providing educational tools, playbooks, and a space for companies to share best practices. This broad approach could speed up the decarbonization of many industries.
As Amazon navigates the twin challenges of AI-driven cloud competition and rising operating costs, its environmental leadership and aggressive long-term planning offer strong fundamentals for future growth.
- READ MORE: Amazon Unveils Carbon Credit Investment Service: A Game Changer for Corporate Sustainability
The post Amazon (AMZN) Stock Dips Despite Q2 2025 Beat: Cloud Growth Slows, Net-Zero Push Expands appeared first on Carbon Credits.
The accounting differences that decide whether your nature investment shows up in inventory, in BVCM, or nowhere at all.
The question reaches a procurement team about three weeks before the next sustainability committee meeting. Someone has read about insetting. Someone else has just signed off on an offset purchase. The CSO wants to know if the two are interchangeable. The answer is no, and the GHG Protocol Land Sector and Removals Standard is the reason why.
This article walks through what each term means at audit-grade specificity, what the standards actually say about how each gets counted, and how to decide which tool fits which target. The insetting vs offsetting question is one of the most-searched in corporate climate strategy, and one of the most poorly answered. By the end of this piece, you should be able to brief a committee on the difference without notes.
The two definitions, in plain English
Offsetting means buying carbon credits generated outside your value chain and retiring them against your residual emissions. The reduction happens somewhere else, financed by you, and the credit is the receipt.
Insetting means investing in emission reductions or removals inside your own value chain, typically with suppliers, where the reduction is directly linked to the products and services you buy. The reduction happens inside the boundary of your Scope 3 inventory, and the accounting treatment is fundamentally different.
The shorthand from the University of Oxford’s Nature-based Insetting Initiative is useful: insetting is what you do with the supply chain you have; offsetting is what you do with the supply chain you do not have.
What the GHG Protocol Land Sector Standard actually says
The GHG Protocol Land Sector and Removals Standard, finalised in 2024 after a multi-year pilot, sets the rules for how land-based emission reductions and removals enter corporate inventories. The Standard distinguishes between inventory accounting (Scope 1, 2, and 3) and project or intervention accounting (a separate methodology for crediting).
For insetting, the practical implication is that supplier-level interventions, when properly measured and attributed, can reduce your Scope 3 category 1 (purchased goods and services) emissions in your inventory. The reduction is not a credit retired against the inventory; it is a lower inventory number, period.
For offsetting, the credit is retired separately. It can be reported as a contribution toward a net-zero claim under the SBTi Beyond Value Chain Mitigation framework or as part of a VCMI Carbon Integrity claim, but it does not lower the inventory number.
A practical consequence: if your Science Based Target requires a 50% absolute reduction in Scope 3 emissions by 2030, insetting moves you toward the target. Offsetting does not. This single point of difference reshapes the procurement decision.
When insetting counts toward Scope 3 (and when it does not)
Insetting counts toward Scope 3 only when several conditions are met:
- The intervention must occur with an entity in your value chain.
- The emissions reduction or removal must be measured against a defensible baseline.
- The reduction must be attributed to your share of that supplier’s output, not double-counted with other buyers.
- It must follow the inventory accounting rules in the GHG Protocol Land Sector Standard, not the project accounting rules used to generate credits.
The most common failure mode is double counting. If your supplier sells the same reduction as a credit on the voluntary market and also reports it to you as a Scope 3 reduction, the math breaks. The Standard requires you to address this risk, typically by purchasing and retiring the supplier-issued credit as part of your inventory or by contractual provisions that prevent the supplier from selling the reduction twice.
When insetting does not count toward Scope 3: when the intervention sits with a supplier you do not buy from, when the baseline is not defensible, when the attribution is unclear, or when the documentation does not survive audit. Those cases default to Beyond Value Chain Mitigation, which is still useful but operates on a different ledger.
The procurement and supplier engagement question
Insetting is harder than offsetting. That is the unfashionable truth most buyers eventually confront. Offsetting is a transaction; insetting is a relationship.
To run an insetting program, you need supplier mapping precise enough to know which farms or facilities sit at which Scope 3 boundary. You need an engagement model that gets suppliers to participate, which usually requires multi-year commitments and shared economics. You need an MRV architecture that measures the right things and produces audit-ready documentation. And you need a contractual structure that prevents double counting and protects both sides.
The trade-off you receive in return is significant. Reductions count against your inventory rather than your residual. Supplier relationships deepen, which protects sourcing continuity. Yield and quality improvements often follow regenerative interventions, which reduces your input cost over time. And the regulatory file, under CSRD, CSDDD, EUDR, and the SBTi FLAG Guidance, is materially stronger.
Choosing the right tool for the right target
A practical decision rule. If your target is a science-based Scope 3 reduction and you operate in a FLAG sector or source FLAG commodities, insetting is the structurally correct tool. If your target is a net-zero claim that includes neutralising hard-to-abate residual emissions outside your value chain, BVCM via high-integrity offsets is the structurally correct tool. Most companies with material Scope 3 exposure need both, in different proportions, sequenced over time.
The sequencing matters. Insetting takes longer to stand up but produces a permanent reduction in the inventory. Offsetting can be transacted faster but does not change the inventory and now sits under tighter claim restrictions. Treat them as complementary tools with different jobs, not as substitutes. The Accountability Framework Initiative and the IUCN Global Standard for Nature-based Solutions both provide useful guardrails for the insetting side, with biodiversity, human rights, and benefit-sharing requirements that go beyond carbon math.
If you are mapping a Scope 3 reduction roadmap and need to scope which interventions count toward your inventory versus which sit in Beyond Value Chain Mitigation, the carbon and sustainability experts at Carbon Credit Capital can help you structure a nature-based supply chain investment program that fits your FLAG exposure, your target architecture, and your audit horizon. Schedule a consultation.
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