Amazon Q2 2026 Earnings: AWS Revenue Climbs 37% to $42.2 Billion, Shares Rise 20% Over Two Days

Amazon reported its second-quarter 2026 earnings, showing AWS revenue rose 37% year-on-year to $42.2 billion, the fastest growth in 18 quarters. Total quarterly revenue increased 20% to $200.6 billion. Operating profit was $27.5 billion, and net profit reached $62.6 billion, including a $53.4 billion pre-tax non-operating gain from its investment in AI company Anthropic. Following the release, Amazon shares rose for two consecutive trading days, with a cumulative gain of about 20%, and its market capitalization briefly surpassed $3 trillion.

Capital expenditure in the quarter was $54.2 billion, up from $32.1 billion in the same period of 2025. Trailing twelve-month free cash flow was a net outflow of $7.6 billion, compared with a net inflow of $18.2 billion one year earlier.

AWS had an operating margin of 39%, and its total contract backlog reached $496 billion. The company’s AI business and self-developed chip business each exceeded $25 billion in annualized revenue, both posting triple-digit percentage growth year-on-year. Jassy said that even with capital expenditure at the $220 billion level in 2026, computing supply is still unable to fully meet customer demand, 2027 will also face a supply gap, and the order volume for computing capacity in 2028 is already significant.

Around the time of Amazon’s earnings, other technology companies also disclosed cloud results. Google Cloud revenue increased 82% year-on-year. The combined planned capital expenditure by Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta on data centers, servers, AI chips and network infrastructure in 2026 is approximately $725 billion to $730 billion, a rise of about 77% compared with 2025.

In the second quarter, Alphabet reported negative free cash flow of $5.9 billion, its first quarterly negative free cash flow since its IPO. Tesla’s free cash flow was negative $1.09 billion, its first negative reading in more than two years. AWS signed a 10-year contract with Anthropic worth over $100 billion in April 2026. In addition, the AWS platform already offers large language models including DeepSeek, Qwen, MiniMax, Moonshot AI and Z. AI. In July 2026, three open-source models—Kimi K3, DeepSeek V4, and Qwen3.8-Max-Preview—were released successively.