By Sean McLain
Amazon.com said Wednesday that revenue and profit rose in the first quarter, fueled by growing AI services and cloud sales.
Revenue for the period rose 17% to $181.5 billion, while net profit increased a sharp 77% to $30.3 billion, which Amazon attributed to pretax income from its investment in Anthropic. Both figures beat analyst estimates, according to FactSet.
Revenue from the Amazon Web Services cloud business, the source of much of the company's profits, grew 28% from a year earlier.
The company forecast revenue for the second quarter of between $194 billion and $199 billion and an operating profit of between $20 billion and $24 billion.
Amazon has said that it added more server capacity than any other company in 2025 and promised to accelerate construction efforts this year. That spending is being scrutinized for signs that it could bring in enough new business to justify the pace of expansion.
When Amazon announced in February its $200 billion spending plan, a 60% increase from the previous year, shares fell.
Now, Amazon's ambitious expansion plan looks prescient. The growing demand for chatbots and other AI-powered tools is outpacing the supply of chips and storage, causing outages and surging prices.
For its part, Amazon has sought to leverage its cloud-computing leadership to partner up with AI model builders, by hosting everyone's services and offering a variety of AI products through its Bedrock service.
Write to Sean McLain at sean.mclain@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
April 29, 2026 16:26 ET (20:26 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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