Highlights

  • Amazon reported Q2 2026 net sales of $200.6 billion, up 20% year over year, crossing $200 billion in a single quarter for the first time as both e-commerce and AWS sustained strong growth.
  • AWS net sales reached $42.2 billion, up 37% year over year, with AI services within AWS each exceeding a $25 billion annual run rate as enterprise customers committed to AI infrastructure at scale.
  • Operating income grew 43% year over year to $27.5 billion, driven by AWS operating leverage, advertising growth, and continued improvement in North America retail profitability.
  • Q3 2026 guidance calls for net sales of $197 to $202 billion and operating income of $20 to $24 billion, reflecting seasonal patterns while sustaining the underlying double-digit revenue growth trajectory.

Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) reported second-quarter 2026 net sales of $200.6 billion, crossing the $200 billion quarterly threshold for the first time in the company's history, as AWS sustained 37% revenue growth and AI services within Amazon's cloud platform each exceeded a $25 billion annual run rate. Total operating income of $27.5 billion, up 43% year over year, reflected the compounding benefit of AWS operating leverage, continued expansion of Amazon's high-margin advertising business, and structural improvement in North America retail profitability following years of logistics network investment.

AWS Revenue Accelerates on AI Infrastructure Demand

AWS net sales of $42.2 billion in Q2 2026, up 37% year over year, confirmed that Amazon's cloud platform is capturing a significant share of the global enterprise AI infrastructure build-out. Amazon disclosed that AI services within AWS — which encompasses Amazon Bedrock for foundational AI model access, Trainium chips for custom AI training, and Inferentia for inference workloads — each exceeded a $25 billion annual revenue run rate in the quarter. This marks a material threshold indicating that AI-related cloud services at Amazon have achieved the revenue scale of a standalone hyperscale cloud business within the broader AWS portfolio.

AWS operating income was not separately disclosed but AWS operating margins have historically exceeded 30%, and management indicated that AWS profitability continued to expand as AI infrastructure services generate higher average selling prices than standard compute and storage. Amazon's custom Trainium and Inferentia chips, which provide a cost and performance alternative to third-party GPUs for AI workloads, have seen expanded adoption as Amazon enables customers to train and deploy AI models on Amazon's own silicon.

Advertising and Retail Sustain Diversified Revenue

Amazon Advertising revenue, which is not separately reported in top-line net sales but contributes meaningfully to operating income, continued to benefit from AI-driven improvements to sponsored product targeting and programmatic advertising. The advertising business carries structurally high margins and has been a consistent contributor to Amazon's improvement in consolidated operating income over the past several years.

North America net sales and International net sales were not separately detailed in the summary figures, but management noted that e-commerce remained healthy with third-party seller services and fulfilment revenue growing in line with underlying merchandise volume. Amazon's same-day and next-day delivery network, built during prior-period capital investment cycles, is now generating profitability improvements as fixed-cost infrastructure utilisation rises with volume.

Operating Leverage Drives Earnings Growth

Total company operating income of $27.5 billion, up 43% year over year, reflects a pattern of revenue growth outpacing cost growth across the company's major segments. The combination of AWS's high-margin profile, advertising revenue expansion, and retail cost structure improvement is widening operating margins at the consolidated level. Capital expenditure remained elevated to support AI data centre construction and Trainium and Inferentia capacity, consistent with Amazon's stated priority of building AI infrastructure ahead of customer demand rather than rationing supply.

Q3 2026 Guidance

For Q3 2026, Amazon guided net sales of $197 billion to $202 billion, representing year-over-year growth of approximately 14% to 17%, and operating income of $20 billion to $24 billion. Management noted that the Q3 guidance range reflects normal quarterly seasonality within a sustained double-digit growth trajectory. No change was made to the company's stated capital expenditure programme or AI infrastructure investment priorities, which management characterised as oriented toward building long-duration capacity aligned with customer AI commitments.

Stock Price Information

Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) traded at $212.27 on 29 October 2026, representing a gain of 1.91% on the day, on volume of 43.69 million shares.