AWS Accelerates to +37% and Anthropic's Accounting Gain Inflates Amazon's Profit by $53 Billion in 2Q26
AWS revenue reached $42.2 billion at the fastest pace in five years. Andy Jassy raised the 2026 capex to $220 billion and admitted it still won't be enough to meet demand.
Amazon closed the second quarter with revenue of $200.6 billion, a 20% year-over-year increase, and results that could confuse any hurried investor. The net income of $62.6 billion includes a non-operational pre-tax gain of $53.4 billion, almost entirely from the market revaluation of its stake in Anthropic. This is accounting money, not cash, something Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon, had to reiterate during the conference call to temper easy interpretations of the operation.
The number that matters to the CIO is different. Amazon Web Services delivered $42.2 billion in revenue for the quarter, a 36.7% year-over-year increase and the fastest pace in nearly five years, surpassing the $40.5 billion expected by consensus. The operating margin of the division rose to 39.4%, compared to just under 33% a year earlier, and AWS's operating income jumped from $10.2 billion to $16.6 billion. Annualized, AWS is now operating above $169 billion in revenue, with two AI and chip business segments each running at a run rate exceeding $25 billion and experiencing triple-digit growth, according to the executives themselves.
The Bottleneck is Physical, Not Commercial
Jassy was direct in pointing out the constraint: Amazon will spend $220 billion in capex this year, an upward revision from the previously indicated $200 billion, yet this will still not be enough capacity to meet all demand through 2026. "And I believe this dynamic will also hold true for 2027," said the executive. The company cited rising memory prices and the acceleration of multi-year and multi-gigawatt contracts with Anthropic and OpenAI as the main drivers of this movement.
The revenue guidance for the third quarter was between $197 billion and $202 billion, representing a 9% to 12% year-over-year growth, below the $204 billion analysts expected. This mixed signal reflects, in part, the impact of this year's Prime Day falling within the second quarter, but it also reinforces that AWS is leaving orders in backlog, unable to fulfill them yet.
The Impact for Consultancies and Global Integrators
For AWS customers and partners, the message is dual and uncomfortable. On one hand, the assurance that the hyperscaler will continue to channel billions into infrastructure for generative AI. On the other, the concrete risk of capacity rationing in specific regions. TCS, Infosys, Accenture, Capgemini, and Cognizant, among others, have heavily invested in dedicated practices for the AWS stack over the last cycle, and the competition for slots in regions like us-east-1, eu-west-1, and ap-southeast-1 intensifies as Jassy himself states that the supply does not meet demand. In India, delivery hubs in Bengaluru and Hyderabad concentrate part of the demand for Bedrock and Trainium projects for American clients, which pressures regional choices. In Brazil, integrators running workloads in sa-east-1 are already experiencing stricter quotas for P5 instances and higher network costs when they need to leave the country.
Anthropic's stake acts as a double signal. Amazon has invested approximately $13 billion in the startup, with room for up to an additional $20 billion. The accounting gain of $53.4 billion is merely the market revaluation of this asset within the balance sheet, with no cash generated. For the CFO, it serves as a reminder that a significant portion of Amazon's reported EPS has ceased to be solely dependent on e-commerce and cloud and has begun to depend on the sentiment with which private investors value AI labs. For the CIO client, it signals that Amazon has a structural incentive to keep Claude as a central offer within Bedrock, even when integrating Gemini or Llama would make sense for the client’s stack.
What to Watch Until the End of 2026
Three points deserve priority in the CIO's reading. First, the gap between AWS's growth and Azure's, which increased by 43% in constant currency at the close of the fiscal year, surpassing $100 billion annualized for the first time, shows that the race for AI workloads still tends towards Microsoft, even though Amazon is closing the gap. Second, the peak capex of $220 billion, above the $130 to $145 billion guided by Meta the day before, adds pressure on the group's free cash flow, something already reflected in Meta's results, where quarterly FCF dropped 91% year-over-year. Third, the increasingly tight link between Amazon and Anthropic ties the balance sheet's fate to a direct competitor of Google and OpenAI, a scenario that will require contractual clarity for multivendor clients.