Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) reported second-quarter net profit of $62.6 billion following a sharp rise in the value of its Anthropic asset, which added billions to the bottom line. Earnings reached $5.75 per diluted share, compared to $18.2 billion, or $1.68 per share, a year earlier.
The 2026 figure included $53.4 billion in pretax profit outside of normal operating activity, primarily from Anthropic. Amazon shares rose more than 10% after regular trading closed.
Quarterly revenue grew to $200.61 billion, exceeding the $196.47 billion forecast by LSEG analysts. Amazon reported that net sales increased 20% from the $167.7 billion recorded in the second quarter of 2025.
Since the impact of foreign exchange fluctuations on revenue was just $100 million, sales growth excluding this factor was 20%. Wall Street analysts had forecast earnings of $1.82 per share, but the significant capital gain reported by the company makes the comparison less straightforward.
Amazon turns AI demand into accelerated AWS growth and increased operating profit
Amazon Web Services sales volume was $42.2 billion, exceeding the StreetAccount forecast of $40.54 billion. AWS revenues grew 37% year-over-year. Advertising revenue was $19.81 billion, surpassing the StreetAccount forecast of $19.43 billion and up 26% from the previous year.
Operating profit rose to $27.5 billion from $19.2 billion previously. AWS profit was $16.6 billion, up from $10.2 billion. Profit from North American operations was $9.1 billion, up from $7.5 billion, while international operations profit was $1.7 billion, up from $1.5 billion.
Amazon's CFO and CEO stated:
"AWS is experiencing explosive growth, increasing 36.7% year-over-year in the second quarter, marking the fastest growth rate in 18 quarters, and the turnover of our AI and chip divisions has exceeded $25 billion annually."
Both companies demonstrated triple-digit growth and achieved annual revenue of over $25 billion.
Amazon reported that Trainium secured multi-year, multi-gigawatt capacity supply contracts from Anthropic and OpenAI. NEURA Robotics, Odyssey, TwelveLabs, Decart, Poolside, Karakuri, Metagenomi Therapeutics, NetoAI, and Splash Music have also adopted or committed to using these chips. Major customers include Uber (NYSE: UBER) and Pinterest (NYSE: PINS).
During the quarter, Graviton5 became widely available. Amazon stated that Graviton provides 30-40% better price-performance ratio than comparable systems. Graviton5 offers up to 25% more compute power than Graviton4. Approximately 98% of the top 1000 EC2 customers use Graviton. Revenue volumes nearly tripled compared to the previous quarter, and Graviton5's growth rate was nearly double that of its predecessor.
Bedrock added over 10 managed foundational models. New options included OpenAI's GPT-5.6, Anthropic's Claude Opus 5, Alphabet's (NASDAQ: GOOGL) DeepMind Gemma 4, and xAI's Grok 4.3. Bedrock is now used by hundreds of thousands of customers. In the past six months, the platform has attracted more customers than in its first two years, and client spending in the second quarter exceeded all previous quarters combined.
Payments, Web Search, and Harness tools were added to Bedrock AgentCore. These tools allow agents to conduct transactions, find up-to-date information without leaving AWS, and connect systems needed for large-scale deployments.
Amazon Quick gained agents capable of running multi-step tasks based on plain language instructions. A personal activity feed and 16 integrations were also added, including Adobe (NASDAQ: ADBE), Moody's (NYSE: MCO), and Snowflake (NYSE: SNOW).
Quick integrates with Salesforce (NYSE: CRM), Slack, Microsoft Teams via Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), Jira from Atlassian (NASDAQ: TEAM), and ServiceNow (NYSE: NOW). It allows organizing meetings, preparing and sending emails, updating customer records, and creating dashboards while maintaining company access rules.
Amazon increases AI spending amid expansion in retail, logistics, media, and satellite tech
Amazon raised its planned capital expenditures for 2026 to $220 billion. In February, the company forecast $200 billion and maintained that figure in April. Jassy stated that rising memory prices increased the budget, while customer demand continues to exceed available compute capacity.
"But even at this volume, we still won't have enough capacity to meet all demand in 2026, and I believe this trend will continue into 2027," said Jassy. "In fact, demand for 2028 is already astonishing."
Operating cash flow for the trailing 12 months grew 33% to $161.4 billion from $121.1 billion for the period ending June 30, 2025. Free cash flow shifted from an inflow of $18.2 billion to an outflow of $7.6 billion. Purchases of property, plant, and equipment net of sales and incentives increased by $66.1 billion, primarily for constructing facilities and manufacturing AI-capable equipment.
Amazon invested $1 billion in AWS Forward Deployed Engineering. This unit will directly connect AI engineers with clients and build functioning agent systems in days instead of months. Early users include Allen Institute, Cox Automotive, NBA, NFL, Ricoh (TYO: 7752), and Southwest Airlines (NYSE: LUV).
The AWS Secret Cloud for Industry also became publicly available. Northrop Grumman (NYSE: NOC) was the first to begin using it for classified work. Additionally, Amazon separately offered up to $1 billion in cloud credits to accelerate cloud solution modernization within the U.S. intelligence community.
Amazon stated its global data centers use water more than seven times more efficiently than the industry average. The company completed 75% of the work needed to achieve its goal of making all data centers water-efficient by 2030. Its direct operations in India reached this level ahead of the 2027 target.
Annual gross sales for Amazon Business reached $60 billion. Product assortment grew by nearly 30%, and corporate buyers gained the ability to receive fresh products the same day in over 2,300 U.S. cities and towns.
The next-generation warehouse robot Proteus can move items weighing up to 1,300 pounds. Workers can command it using plain spoken language. In the first half of the year, Amazon Pharmacy more than doubled its number of new customers, and same-day prescription deliveries grew nearly fivefold. Manufacturer automatic discounts saved customers nearly $250 million, an increase of over 400% compared to the previous year.
The Ads Agent service expanded to 11 more countries. Advertisers using it recorded an 8% lower cost per thousand impressions (CPM) and a 6% lower customer acquisition cost compared to advertisers who did not use the tool.
