Amazon booked $200.6 billion in second-quarter net sales, its first $200 billion quarter, as AWS revenue jumped 37 percent year-over-year to $42.2 billion, the cloud unit’s fastest expansion in 18 quarters and a sharp acceleration from 28 percent in Q1. AWS beat the $40.54 billion StreetAccount consensus by a wide margin.
The unit’s operating income of $16.62 billion, at a 36.8 percent margin, accounted for nearly 61 percent of Amazon’s total operating profit. Company-wide operating income rose 43 percent to $27.5 billion. AWS is no longer subsidizing retail; it’s carrying the P&L.
On the investor call, CEO Andy Jassy raised full-year 2026 capital expenditure guidance to $220 billion and disclosed an AWS backlog of $496 billion. “Even at that amount, we will still not have enough capacity to meet all the demand we have in 2026, and I believe this dynamic will also be true in 2027 too,” he said. Jassy also noted that AWS’s AI business and custom silicon business each surpassed a $25 billion annualized run rate, more than doubling year-over-year.
GAAP net income landed at $62.6 billion, inflated by a $53.4 billion pre-tax non-operating gain tied to Amazon’s Anthropic stake. EPS of $5.75 blew past the $1.82 LSEG consensus, though the mark-to-market on a private AI holding is closer to accounting weather than operating performance.
Q3 guidance of $197 to $202 billion came in under the $204.1 billion LSEG consensus, which the company attributed to earlier Prime Day timing. Shares rose more than 10 percent after hours anyway. The read-through: after a decade of hyperscaler capex being framed as a discipline problem, the market now treats $220 billion as the price of admission, and worries the backlog says it isn’t enough.