Amazon posts $62.6 billion profit as its Anthropic investment delivers a massive gain

Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) reported $62.6 billion in second-quarter net income after a sharp rise in the value of its Anthropic holding added billions to the result. Profit reached $5.75 per diluted share, compared with $18.2 billion, or $1.68 per share, one year earlier.

The 2026 figure included $53.4 billion in pre-tax income outside normal operations, mainly from Anthropic. Amazon shares gained more than 10% after regular trading ended.

Quarterly revenue was up to $200.61 billion, exceeding the $196.47 billion anticipated by analysts polled by LSEG. Net sales increased by 20% compared to $167.7 billion posted in Q2 2025, according to Amazon.

With currency impacting revenue only by $100 million, sales growth was 20% without this effect. Wall Street projected earnings of $1.82 per share, but the sizable capital gain reported by the company makes the comparison less straightforward.

Amazon turns AI demand into faster AWS growth and higher operating profit

The sales figures for Amazon Web Services stood at $42.2 billion, exceeding the expected StreetAccount estimates of $40.54 billion. The revenue from AWS saw an increase of 37% compared to the previous year. Advertising was reported at $19.81 billion, which is greater than the StreetAccount estimate of $19.43 billion and increased by 26%.

Operating profit increased to $27.5 billion, against $19.2 billion before. AWS contributed $16.6 billion, against $10.2 billion previously. North America delivered $9.1 billion, against $7.5 billion, whereas international operations delivered $1.7 billion against $1.5 billion previously.

Amazon President and Chief Executive Officer Andy Jassy said:

“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.”

Both operations grew by triple-digit percentages and passed a $25 billion annual revenue pace.

Amazon said Trainium secured multi-year, multi-gigawatt commitments from Anthropic and OpenAI. NEURA Robotics, Odyssey, TwelveLabs, Decart, Poolside, Karakuri, Metagenomi Therapeutics, NetoAI, and Splash Music also adopted or committed to the chips. Larger customers included Uber (NYSE: UBER) and Pinterest (NYSE: PINS).

Graviton5 became widely available during the quarter. Amazon said Graviton can deliver 30% to 40% better price-to-output results than similar systems. Graviton5 supplies up to 25% more computing power than Graviton4. About 98% of the top 1,000 EC2 customers use Graviton. Revenue commitments almost tripled from the previous quarter, and Graviton5 grew nearly twice as fast as its predecessor.

Bedrock added more than 10 managed foundation models. The new choices included OpenAI’s GPT-5.6, Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5, Alphabet’s (NASDAQ: GOOGL) Google DeepMind Gemma 4, and xAI’s Grok 4.3. Hundreds of thousands of customers now use Bedrock. The platform gained more customers during the past six months than it did in its first two years, while second-quarter customer spending exceeded all earlier quarters combined.

Bedrock AgentCore added Payments, Web Search, and Harness. Those tools let agents complete transactions, find current information without leaving AWS, and connect the systems needed to run large deployments.

Amazon Quick received agents that can run multi-step jobs from plain-language instructions. It also gained a personal activity feed and 16 integrations, including Adobe (NASDAQ: ADBE), Moody’s (NYSE: MCO), and Snowflake (NYSE: SNOW).

Quick works with Salesforce (NYSE: CRM), Slack, Microsoft Teams through Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), Atlassian’s Jira (NASDAQ: TEAM), and ServiceNow (NYSE: NOW). It can arrange meetings, prepare and send email, update customer records, and create dashboards while keeping a company’s access rules.

Amazon raises AI spending as retail, logistics, media, and satellites expand

Amazon increased its planned 2026 capital spending to $220 billion. It had forecast $200 billion in February and kept that number in April. Jassy said higher memory prices added to the budget, while customer demand still exceeded available computing power.

“But 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,” Jassy said. “In fact, the demand we already have for 2028 is striking.”

Operating cash flow for the latest 12 months rose 33% to $161.4 billion, from $121.1 billion for the period that ended June 30, 2025. Free cash flow went from an $18.2 billion inflow to a $7.6 billion outflow. Purchases of property and equipment, after sales and incentives, increased by $66.1 billion, mainly because of AI construction and hardware.

Amazon committed $1 billion to AWS Forward Deployed Engineering. The unit will place AI engineers directly with customers and build working agent systems in days rather than months. Early users include the Allen Institute, Cox Automotive, the NBA, the NFL, Ricoh (TYO: 7752), and Southwest Airlines (NYSE: LUV).

AWS Secret Cloud for Industry also became generally available. Northrop Grumman (NYSE: NOC) became the first company to run classified work on it. Amazon separately offered up to $1 billion in cloud credits to speed up cloud upgrades across the U.S. Intelligence Community.

Amazon said its global data centers use water more than seven times as efficiently as the wider industry. The company completed 75% of the work needed for its goal of becoming water positive across data center operations by 2030. Its direct operations in India reached that status before the 2027 deadline.

Amazon Business reached $60 billion in annualized gross sales. Its product range grew by almost 30%, and business buyers gained same-day delivery for fresh groceries in more than 2,300 U.S. cities and towns.

The next Proteus warehouse robot can carry goods weighing up to 1,300 pounds. Workers can give it instructions through normal spoken language. Amazon Pharmacy more than doubled its new customers during the first half, while same-day prescription deliveries grew almost fivefold. Automatic manufacturer discounts cut customer spending by nearly $250 million, over 400% more than one year earlier.

Ads Agent expanded into 11 additional countries. Advertisers using it recorded an 8% lower cost per impression and a 6% lower cost per customer acquisition than advertisers who did not use the tool.