Amazon reported a sharp jump in second-quarter profits and net sales, propelled by the fastest growth in its cloud computing division in more than four years as demand for artificial intelligence services continued to surge.
The Seattle-based company said net income reached $62.65 billion, or $5.75 per share, in the three months ended June 30, up from $18.16 billion, or $1.68 per share, a year earlier. Net sales climbed to $200.6 billion from $167.7 billion, surpassing analyst expectations of roughly $197 billion.
Amazon Web Services, the company’s cloud unit and a central driver of its profitability, posted a 37% revenue increase during the April–June period. That marked an acceleration from 28% in the previous quarter and the fastest expansion in 18 quarters.
The results underscore how the boom in generative AI has reshaped Amazon’s earnings profile, with businesses ramping up spending on cloud infrastructure to train and deploy new models. The strength in AWS mirrors a broader trend that has lifted the company through recent quarters, echoing the momentum seen when cloud growth strengthened the case for its heavy AI investments.
Amazon also issued a sales outlook for the current quarter that topped Wall Street forecasts, signalling confidence that demand for its services and technology will keep expanding.
Investor attention has centred on the company’s aggressive capital spending plans. Amazon has projected 2026 capital expenditure of about $200 billion, and some analysts believe the figure could climb higher as AI-related demand intensifies. The scale of that outlay had earlier rattled some investors concerned about near-term returns.
The spending is largely directed toward data centres, chips and networking capacity needed to support AWS and the AI workloads running on it. Executives have framed the investment as essential to capturing long-term growth in cloud computing.
The latest figures suggest that heavy outlay is beginning to translate into accelerating revenue, easing some of the pressure that had weighed on the stock earlier in the year.
Attention now turns to whether Amazon can sustain the pace of cloud growth into the second half of the year while managing the cost of its expanding infrastructure footprint.