Amazon shares jump as AWS growth and Anthropic gain lift earnings

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.