SEATTLE – Amazon today reported better-than expected revenue growth in its fiscal 2026 second quarter, led by Amazon Web Services, its cloud computing business.
“AWS is booming, growing 36.7% year-over-year in Q2 — our fastest growth in 18 quarters— and our AI and chips businesses each eclipsed run rates of more than $25 billion,” Andy Jassy, Amazon’s president and CEO, said in a statement.
“In stores, we again set record delivery speeds for Prime members in the first half of the year — over 40% more items delivered same-day or overnight, with grocery and everyday essentials growing meaningfully faster than the rest of the business," Jassy said. "And advertising had another strong quarter with 26% year-over-year growth. There’s a lot to be excited about, and we have much more coming for customers in the second half of the year and beyond.”
Amazon said second-quarter net sales rose 20% to $200.6 billion. AWS contributed revenue of $42.2 billion. North American net sales increased 16% to $116 billion. The international segment saw a 15% revenue gain from a year earlier, to $42.2 billion.
Amazon benefitted from the move of its Prime Day shopping extravaganza into the second quarter. Last year’s event occurred in the third quarter.
Amazon said net income increased to $62.2 billion, or $5.75 per diluted share, compared to $18.2 billion, or $1.68 per diluted share, a year earlier.
The company said second-quarter net income was boosted by non-operating, pre-tax contributions of $53.4 billon, primarily from its investments in Anthropic, a leader in artificial intelligence research.
Fifth consecutive quarter for cloud sales growth
Amazon this year marked the 20th anniversary of AWS, which for years spun out profits that subsidized the build-out of retail infrastructure, including warehouses, vehicles and drivers needed for same-day deliveries. But exponential growth in demand for cloud computing has attracted competitors and compelled Amazon to invest heavily to protect AWS’s turf.
Capital expenditures during the second quarter reached $54.2 billion, compared with $32.1 billion a year earlier. Jassy has sought to soothe investors’ fears about Amazon’s massive investments in AI with assurances that the demand for AI products and services is keeping pace.
Among second-quarter highlights cited by Amazon was investment of $1 billion to create AWS Forward Deployed Engineering, a team of AI engineers embedded directly with customers to co-develop and deploy agentic AI solutions in days rather than months. Early customers include Allen Institute, Cox Automotive, the NBA, the NFL, Ricoh, and Southwest Airlines.
The company also announced general availability of AWS Secret Cloud for Industry, giving defense contractors a faster, more secure path to classified innovation, with Northrop Grumman first to run classified workloads on the platform, and committed up to $1 billion in cloud credits to accelerate U.S. intelligence community cloud migration and modernization.
