Amazon.com on October 29, 2026 announced financial results for its third quarter ended September 30, 2026, reporting net sales of $201.9 billion, up 12% from $180.2 billion in the third quarter of 2025, as AWS segment sales climbed 39% to $46.0 billion.
Third-Quarter Results
North America segment sales increased 6% year-over-year to $112.9 billion, and International segment sales rose 5% to $43.1 billion, or 8% excluding foreign-exchange changes. Consolidated net sales rose 13% excluding a $0.9 billion unfavorable foreign-exchange impact. Amazon said Prime Day shifted to the second quarter in most large countries this year from entirely the third quarter in 2025, and that excluding the shift, year-over-year growth would have been approximately 400 basis points higher.
Operating income increased to $28.1 billion from $17.4 billion in the third quarter of 2025. North America operating income was $8.7 billion, up from $4.8 billion; International operating income was $1.6 billion, up from $1.2 billion; and AWS operating income was $17.8 billion, up from $11.4 billion. Amazon said the consolidated operating margin of 13.9% was its highest ever.
Net income decreased to $20.7 billion, or $1.89 per diluted share, from $21.2 billion, or $1.95 per diluted share, in the third quarter of 2025. Amazon attributed the decrease primarily to $9.5 billion in pre-tax gains from its investments in Anthropic that were included in non-operating income in the year-earlier quarter.
AWS Growth and AI Spending
AWS net sales increased 39.3%, which Amazon described as the segment’s fastest growth in nearly five years, bringing the cloud unit to a $184 billion annualized revenue run rate. President and CEO Andy Jassy said AWS’s investment in functionality and infrastructure is working and pointed to projected revenue growth rates of more than 40% in both 2027 and 2028. Jassy said there has never been a trillion-dollar revenue business and that Amazon may have two of them in the next five to ten years.
Operating cash flow rose 29% to $168.3 billion for the trailing twelve months, while free cash flow swung to an outflow of $42.4 billion from an inflow of $14.8 billion a year earlier. The decrease was driven primarily by a $94.8 billion year-over-year increase in purchases of property and equipment, net of proceeds from sales and incentives, which Amazon said primarily reflects investments in artificial intelligence. The company continues to expect 2026 cash capital expenditures of approximately $220 billion.
Amazon said it signed new AWS agreements with Meta, NVIDIA, OpenAI, Salesforce, Oracle, Qualcomm, Verizon, ADP, Stripe, Zoom, NATO, and Columbia University Irving Medical Center, among others.
AI Services and Developer Products
Amazon said Fortune 500 companies spent nearly 7x more year-over-year on Amazon Bedrock, its inference service, while total Bedrock token volume grew nearly 17x. During the period AWS added OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra, GPT-6 Sol, GPT-6 Luna, and GPT-6.1 Sol; Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5.1, Opus 5.5, Sonnet 5.5, and Haiku 5.5; Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3; SpaceXAI’s Grok 4.7; Z.ai’s GLM 5.3; and two purpose-built OpenAI cybersecurity models to Bedrock, and launched built-in web search for OpenAI models on the service.
AWS launched a public preview of Bedrock Managed Agents, a managed service powered by OpenAI for building and deploying enterprise AI agents. It released the open source Strands harness, which Amazon said lowers the cost of agent tasks by 32% through greater token efficiency at equal or better accuracy, and previewed Strands Box, an open source sandbox for defining and enforcing rules for agent behavior. Amazon said tens of thousands of customers now use Bedrock AgentCore, and those customers deployed 2x more agents in the third quarter than in the prior three quarters combined.
AWS’s Lambda serverless offering topped a $1 billion annualized revenue run rate and gained Lambda Web Functions for running web applications on the platform. Amazon made its Continuum AI security service generally available and said it is bringing the service into Anthropic’s Claude Code, OpenAI’s Codex, and AWS’s Kiro. The company also acquired DuckLabs, the company behind the open source DuckDB data analysis tool, and introduced TorchNeuron, which Amazon said allows existing PyTorch code to run on its Trainium AI accelerator without rewriting.
Retail and Other Operations
Amazon said it delivered its fastest third-quarter speeds ever for Prime members, with more than 1.5 billion items arriving same-day or overnight. Its ultra-fast Amazon Now service is available in more than 450 towns and cities, with items ordered up 10x year-over-year, and the company said fresh grocery and everyday-essentials sales grew about three times faster than the rest of the store and represented about half of all units sold in the quarter.
The company launched 34 new devices across Echo, Kindle, Fire TV, Ring, Blink, and Bee, and expanded Alexa+ to Australia, India, and Japan. Amazon said its Leo low Earth orbit satellite service remains on track for initial service later this year, with AT&T signed as the first major U.S. telecom provider to offer Leo connectivity, and Zoox began paid robotaxi rides in Las Vegas and started testing in San Diego and Houston.
Amazon also introduced Built Together, a $1 billion community investment program for U.S. data center communities, announced plans to hire more than 300,000 employees across its U.S. operations for the holiday season, and announced a $1.5 billion-plus investment to raise minimum starting pay for U.S. full-time operations employees to $20 an hour.
Fourth-Quarter Guidance
For the fourth quarter of 2026, Amazon guided net sales of $240.0 billion to $247.0 billion, representing growth of 12% to 16% and anticipating an unfavorable foreign-exchange impact of approximately 60 basis points. Operating income is expected at $28.5 billion to $33.5 billion, versus $25.0 billion in the fourth quarter of 2025, and Amazon said it expects high-teens year-over-year advertising revenue growth. The earnings conference call was scheduled for 2:00 p.m. PT on October 29, 2026.
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