Amazon sells
everything. It makes
its money selling
computing.
Retail is the revenue. AWS is the profit. Both just reaccelerated.
↓ scroll to read
✦ The bottom line
Amazon pulled in $181.5 billion in three months, up 17%. But the story is where the profit comes from: its cloud arm, AWS, growing 28% — its fastest in years.
↓ the brief below
✦ Teach me
Money coming in
Every dollar Amazon took in during the quarter — from the online store, third-party sellers, Prime, ads, and renting cloud computers. The simplest measure of size. Not profit.
Wall Street calls this
Revenue
Most of this is low-margin retail. The trick to understanding Amazon is seeing which slice actually makes the money.
The headline number · latest quarter
$181.5
B
Money in for the three months ending March 2026 — up 17% from a year earlier. Operating profit grew even faster, up 30%.
$181.5 billion is the size — and most of it is retail, a famously thin-margin business. So the size isn't the point. The point is the slice that prints the profit: AWS, the cloud-computing business Amazon invented. It had slowed for a couple of years, which worried investors. Did it reaccelerate? Here's the number that matters most.
The engine that matters · AWS
$37.6
B
AWS revenue grew 28% — its fastest in 15 quarters. Only ~21% of sales, but where the AI demand and the profit both land.
AWS is the profit engine. But a quieter third business has been compounding in the background — one most shoppers never think of as an Amazon product. When you search Amazon and see 'sponsored' results, that's an ad. At Amazon's scale, advertising has become enormous, and it costs almost nothing to deliver. How big?
The quiet third engine · Advertising
$17.2
B
Advertising brought in $17.2B (+24%) in the quarter — now a $70B+ a year business, and far higher-margin than selling goods.