Amazon tops Walmart in sales as its cloud arm generates 60% of total profit

The company that built its empire selling books at discounted prices has displaced the company that defined American retail for half a century. Amazon has surpassed Walmart in total sales — a milestone that says less about shopping than about what has quietly grown underneath it.

The business that most Amazon customers never interact with — its cloud computing division, Amazon Web Services — has become the unit that generates most of the company’s profit. AWS effectively subsidizes everything consumers associate with Amazon: the warehouse network, the Prime Video library, the logistics apparatus, the free-delivery promises. Without cloud, the retail empire as it exists could not be sustained on retail margins alone.

AWS generated 60% of Amazon’s total operating income in its most recent quarter while representing just 21% of revenue. The advertising business added a third engine: first-half 2026 ad sales reached $37 billion, up 25% year-over-year, placing Amazon alongside Google and Meta as one of the three dominant digital ad platforms globally.

Net sales in Q2 2026 reached $200.6 billion, compared to $30.4 billion in the same quarter ten years earlier. Revenue for the full year is projected at $828.3 billion by analyst consensus, with a further 53% expansion and 86% earnings-per-share growth expected through 2028.

The growth case has genuine friction, however. Over the past five years, Amazon stock gained 47% — well below the S&P 500’s pace — and at a market capitalization of $2.7 trillion, much of the projected growth is already priced in. Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud are competing aggressively for enterprise cloud accounts, spending at comparable scale. Analyst projections assume AWS holds its market position; the evidence is solid but not guaranteed.

Workers, consumers, and regulators occupy a different vantage point. Amazon captures 40% of all US e-commerce spending, a concentration that has drawn sustained antitrust scrutiny in Washington and Brussels. European regulators have challenged the company’s dual role as both marketplace operator and direct competitor to its own sellers — a structural conflict that could reshape margins in ways consensus models do not account for.

Amazon is expected to report quarterly results in late October. The FTC’s antitrust case against the company is scheduled for trial later this year.

Tags: amazon, AMZN, cloud computing, Walmart, AWS