AWS growth reaccelerates to 37% as Amazon raises AI capex guidance to $220 billion

Amazon Web Services grew revenue 37% year over year to $42.2 billion in the second quarter of 2026, its fastest expansion in 18 quarters, the company said in its second-quarter results on July 30.

The reacceleration eases fears that Amazon’s cloud unit had ceded AI momentum to Microsoft and Google, and it came alongside a sharply higher spending commitment. Amazon raised its 2026 capital-expenditure guidance to $220 billion from $200 billion, with the extra $20 billion going mainly to AI and AWS infrastructure.

AWS now runs at a $169 billion annualized revenue rate. Amazon said its AI and custom-chip businesses each passed $25 billion in annual revenue run rate. Total company net sales reached $200.6 billion, up 20%.

Net profit was $62.6 billion, or $5.75 a share, though the figure was inflated by a $53.4 billion non-operating pre-tax gain tied to Amazon’s investment in Anthropic. Investors focused on the growth and the guidance: shares rose more than 9% in after-hours trading.

Chief Executive Andy Jassy said Amazon still will not have enough capacity to meet all AI demand in 2026 or 2027 – a supply-constraint warning that has become a common refrain across the largest cloud providers this year.

The scale of the spending raises the stakes. Amazon is now committing more than a fifth of a trillion dollars in a single year on the bet that AI demand keeps outrunning the capacity it can build.