** Shares in Amazon.com AMZN.O drop nearly 4% on Thur, on track for a third straight days of losses ahead of its quarterly report due after market close, as investors focus on co's heavy spending on AI
** AMZN's drop was part of a broad AI selloff after Alphabet GOOGL.O on Wed said it could as much as double its capex in 2026 as it builds AI datacenters
** While investors focus heavily on Amazon's cloud computing business, which represents 18% of its revenue, and its ecommerce business, analysts are also focused on physical store revenue, which includes Whole Foods, with expectations for an increase of 5.4% y/y as the company deepens its competition with rivals such as Walmart WMT.N
** Wall Street analysts on average see the ecommerce and web services giant reporting Q4 adj EPS of $1.97 vs $1.86 yr-ago with revenue rising more than 12% to $211.33 bln, per LSEG
** In last 8 quarters, AMZN handily beat EPS consensus every time while revenue met or beat expectations 7 times
** AMZN last traded around $224.19 vs median PT of $300 according to LSEG, which shows 71 analyst ratings: 19 'strong buy,' 48 'buy,' and 4 'hold' ratings
** YTD the stock has fallen ~3% vs a ~2% gain for the Dow Industrials .DJI and a drop of ~1.8% for the S&P 500 consumer discretionary index .SPLRCD
(Reporting by Sinead Carew)
((sinead.carew@thomsonreuters.com))