Amazon in the AI stack

The business and what the filings show

Amazon is the largest single spender in the AI build-out: $173B of capital spending over its latest four quarters against $161B of operating cash flow, which left free cash flow of −$11.6B. Not all of it is for AI (Amazon also builds warehouses and logistics), but AWS is the reason for most of the increase.

AWS brought in $148B of revenue over its latest four quarters, +28%, and $54.7B of operating income. Amazon is also Anthropic’s largest financial partner: it has invested $8.0 billion in convertible notes and $10.0 billion in preferred stock, agreed a facility of up to $20 billion that opens as AWS delivers compute, and reports that Anthropic expanded its commitment to AWS by more than $100 billion over ten years, including obligations tied to Amazon’s own Trainium chips. In 2026 it added OpenAI: $50 billion of preferred stock, alongside a $38 billion AWS commitment from OpenAI that has been expanded by $100 billion.

That relationship also moves Amazon’s earnings: it booked large gains on its Anthropic stake in 2026, which sit below operating income but inside net income and earnings per share. For investors the cleaner reads are AWS growth and margin, and how much of AWS’s new business depends on customers Amazon itself finances.

How AI shows up in the numbers

For Amazon, AI is mostly an AWS story: demand for GPU and Trainium capacity, model hosting and the Anthropic relationship. The retail business also uses AI heavily, but its effect is buried in a much larger revenue base. That makes AWS’s segment disclosures, rather than Amazon’s consolidated results, the place to read the return on its AI spending.

Amazon’s $173B of capital spending over the latest four quarters is 31% of the $566B the five largest buyers spent over their latest four quarters. The five together raised capex +81% on the four quarters before; Amazon’s own revenue grew +16%.

How it talks about AI

In its latest earnings release, furnished to the SEC on October 29, 2026, Amazon mentioned AI 10 times in 1,854 words of narrative text, about 5.4 mentions per 1,000 words. Of its 10 sentences about AI, 1 included a number: a revenue figure, a growth rate, a customer count or another measurable result. Across the 8 releases we read, back to February 6, 2025, AI mentions per 1,000 words went from 7.0 to 5.4.

Specific claims are easier to check against the numbers than general enthusiasm, which is why the share of AI sentences that carry a figure is worth watching alongside how often AI is mentioned. The sentences below are quoted from the release as published, after removing safe-harbor text and company boilerplate.

• “Continued to drive rapid adoption of Alexa for Shopping, its agentic shopping assistant, which was used by 400 million+ customers in the last 12 months, with customer interactions up 570% year-over-year.”
• “This increase primarily reflects investments in artificial intelligence.”
• “Signed new AWS agreements with Meta, NVIDIA, OpenAI, Salesforce, Oracle, Qualcomm, Verizon, ADP, Stripe, Accenture Edge, Novo, Fanatics, Zoom, Raymond James, Prometheus AI, AppFolio, Instructure, Cognition, Sigma, Lila Sciences, The Biological Computing Co., NATO, Columbia University Irving Medical Center, and more.”

Source: earnings release (Form 8-K, Exhibit 99.1), October 29, 2026.

The trend in the numbers

Since the start of 2023, Amazon’s largest quarter by revenue was Q4 2025 at $213B, and its highest gross margin was 52% in Q2 2026. The latest quarter was below that peak.

Quarter by quarter, Amazon’s revenue grew +13% in Q3 2025, +14% in Q4 2025, +17% in Q1 2026, +20% in Q2 2026 on the same quarter a year earlier. Growth has been accelerating.

Gross margin in the latest quarter was 52%, against 52% a year earlier, little changed. Operating margin moved from 11% to 14% over the same span. Over the latest four quarters it turned 21% of its revenue into operating cash flow and spent 22% of revenue on capital projects, against 16% a year earlier.

Segments that matter for AI

The parts of Amazon’s reported results most tied to the AI build-out, from the segment and product disclosures in its 10-K and 10-Q filings.

Where it sits in the stack

Amazon sits in the AI clouds layer of the AI stack. It is paid by the software layer; its own spending flows to servers, networking, power & DCs, chips.

Among the 8 companies in this layer on our map, it ranks first by revenue and number 7 of 7 by revenue growth. Its gross margin of 51% compares with 61% for the layer as a whole, so it keeps less of each dollar than the layer average. The full layer analysis is on the AI clouds page.

Latest four quarters for 10-Q filers; latest fiscal year for 20-F filers. Companies under $100 million of revenue are left out.

Against the 7 US-listed companies in its layer, Amazon grew +16% over the latest year versus +20% for the layer combined, and converted −1% of revenue into free cash flow versus 3% for the layer. It is growing roughly in line with its layer.

What has to go right, and what could go wrong

What has to go right. AWS growth has to keep accelerating as new capacity comes online, Trainium has to lower Amazon’s cost of compute relative to merchant GPUs, and Anthropic has to keep growing into its expanded commitment.

What could go wrong. Free cash flow is already negative over the latest four quarters, so a slowdown in AWS would meet a spending plan that is hard to cut quickly. Exposure to Anthropic runs through revenue, a credit facility and investment gains together.

These describe the conditions the business depends on, as the filings show them. They are not a view on the stock.

Through the lens of Investing in AI

Rob May’s book offers six mental models for telling AI moats from traps. The one most useful for Amazon’s layer is “Expect major market dislocations”: Most markets move slowly. AI does not. A single technical result can force the market to reprice an entire layer overnight. Assume fast repricings and sudden business-model breaks are normal, and position to benefit from shocks.

The question it asks of any company is: Which three to five assumptions have to hold for this investment to work? Applied to Amazon, the filings on this page are the place to start: the margin trend shows whether it holds scarce value or passes it through, the customer and financing disclosures show who it depends on, and the commitments show what it has promised before the revenue arrives.

Customers and concentration

US companies must disclose any customer that accounts for 10% or more of revenue, and foreign filers usually describe their largest customers. Concentration matters because a company’s growth is only as durable as the handful of buyers behind it, and in the AI stack those buyers are often the same few companies.

• We have not found a customer-concentration statement in Amazon’s latest filings that our reader can quote cleanly; see its filings on SEC EDGAR.

Financing links

Investments, guarantees, purchase commitments, warrants and power contracts between Amazon and other companies, each quoted from the filing that discloses it. Numbers match the money-loop map.

• 3Amazon → AnthropicEquity investment

  $8.0B in convertible notes, 2023–2025

  “From Q3 2023 to Q4 2025, we invested $8.0 billion in convertible notes from Anthropic, which are classified as available-for-sale and reported at fair value with unrealized gains and losses included in "Accumulated other comprehensive income (loss)" and as Level 3 assets.”

  Amazon 10-Q for the period ended June 30, 2026, filed July 31, 2026

• 4Amazon → AnthropicEquity investment

  $5.0B in Series G preferred, 2026

  “In Q2 2026, we invested $5.0 billion in Anthropic Series G nonvoting preferred stock.”

  Amazon 10-Q for the period ended June 30, 2026, filed July 31, 2026

• 5Amazon → AnthropicCredit or guarantee

  Up to $20B facility, released as compute is delivered

  “Additionally, we entered into a financing arrangement to make available to Anthropic an aggregate facility not to exceed $20.0 billion that will expire 30 months after an Anthropic liquidity event, including an initial public offering ("IPO").”

  Amazon 10-Q for the period ended June 30, 2026, filed July 31, 2026

• 6Anthropic → AmazonPurchase commitment

  Commitment to AWS expanded by more than $100B over 10 years

  “In Q2 2026, AWS and Anthropic announced an expansion of the strategic collaboration and existing multi-year commitment by more than $100.0 billion over 10.0 years, which includes contractual obligations related to the performance of AWS chips.”

  Amazon 10-Q for the period ended June 30, 2026, filed July 31, 2026

• 7Amazon → OpenAIEquity investment

  $50B of preferred stock: $15B invested, $35B committed

  “We also invested $15.0 billion in Series C Preferred Stock of OpenAI and entered into an equity commitment letter agreement (the "Letter Agreement"), pursuant to which we agreed to purchase additional shares of Series C Preferred Stock (the "Commitment Shares") with an aggregate purchase price of $35.0 billion (the "Commitment Amount").”

  Amazon 10-Q for the period ended June 30, 2026, filed July 31, 2026

• 8OpenAI → AmazonPurchase commitment

  $38B AWS commitment, expanded by $100B over 8 years

  “In Q1 2026, AWS and OpenAI Group PBC ("OpenAI") announced an expansion of the existing $38.0 billion multi-year commitment and commercial arrangement with OpenAI by $100.0 billion over 8.0 years, which includes contractual obligations related to the performance of AWS chips.”

  Amazon 10-Q for the period ended June 30, 2026, filed July 31, 2026

• 9Amazon → AnthropicEquity investment

  $5.0B in Series H preferred, drawn from the facility

  “Under this financing arrangement, in Q2 2026, we exercised our option to participate in subsequent Anthropic equity financings by investing $5.0 billion in Anthropic Series H nonvoting preferred stock, which reduced the amount available under the facility to $15.0 billion.”

  Amazon 10-Q for the period ended June 30, 2026, filed July 31, 2026

Commitments and backlog

• Backlog. Amazon doesn’t report a comparable total of remaining performance obligations in its XBRL data.
• Server life. Amazon depreciates its servers and network equipment over 5 to 6 years, after changes it disclosed: 4→5 years (January 1, 2022); 5→6 years (January 2024); 6→5 years (January 1, 2025). See the useful-life calculator.
• Gains on its Anthropic stake. “The upward adjustments relating to equity investments in private companies of $50.5 billion in Q2 2026 and $62.8 billion for the six months ended June 30, 2026 reflect observable changes in prices, primarily from our nonvoting preferred stock in Anthropic.” 10-Q

What to watch

Amazon’s next quarterly report will cover the quarter ending around September 29, 2026. Large companies must file a 10-Q within 40 days of a quarter’s end and a 10-K within 60 days of the fiscal year’s end, so the new figures should arrive by about November 28, 2026 at the latest. This page, the layer pages and the next quarterly report all update from that filing.

• AWS revenue growth and operating margin: AWS is where Amazon’s AI spending has to earn its return.
• Capex against operating cash flow, now leaving negative free cash flow, and whether that persists as new capacity comes online.
• Gains on the Anthropic stake against operating income, since they lift net income without any cash coming in.
• Its place in the next quarterly AI Stack Report, which updates every company on the map from the new filings.

Figures from Amazon’s SEC filings, latest period ended June 30, 2026. Other companies: all company pages.