Last quarter, Amazon.com Inc. hinted that spending on investments such as data centers and warehouses would rise in 2019. The magnitude of those outlays is one of the biggest questions investors have ahead of Amazon’s first-quarter earnings on Thursday afternoon.
The answer will help determine how profitable the world’s biggest Internet retailer will be, and is a yardstick that investors have become increasingly fixated on as Amazon pushes deeper into more lucrative businesses such as cloud computing and advertising. Shares of the company rose as much as 1.1 percent in early trading.
