Amazon is now the world’s largest company by revenue. In fiscal year 2025, the company posted $716.9 billion in net sales — surpassing Walmart’s $713.2 billion and ending more than a decade of retail dominance by the Arkansas-based giant. The milestone, confirmed in Amazon’s Q4 earnings release on February 5, 2026, is the clearest sign yet that the age of tech-driven commerce has overtaken traditional brick-and-mortar retail as the defining economic force of our time.
Why Amazon Surpassing Walmart Matters
For most of the past two decades, Walmart sat at the top of the Fortune Global 500 — a position it had occupied virtually unchallenged since 2014. Its reign was built on an extraordinary physical infrastructure: 10,771 stores in 19 countries, 2.1 million employees, and a supply chain that remains one of the most sophisticated logistics operations on the planet.
Amazon’s ascent to the top spot is not simply a story about one company beating another. It is a structural shift in what “biggest” means. Where Walmart’s revenue comes primarily from selling goods through physical and digital storefronts, Amazon’s revenue is increasingly generated by cloud computing, artificial intelligence services, third-party seller commissions, and advertising. In 2025, Amazon’s service revenues — AWS, advertising, subscriptions, and third-party seller services — totaled $420.7 billion, outpacing its $296.3 billion in product sales. The world’s largest company now makes more money selling compute power and digital services than it does selling physical goods.
What Is Amazon’s Revenue Breakdown in 2025?
As of fiscal year 2025 (ending December 31, 2025), Amazon’s $716.9 billion in revenue breaks down across three primary segments:
| Segment | 2025 Revenue | YoY Growth |
|---|---|---|
| North America | $426.3 billion | +10% |
| International | $161.9 billion | +13% |
| Amazon Web Services (AWS) | $128.7 billion | +20% |
| Total | $716.9 billion | +12% |
AWS, despite being the smallest segment by revenue, generated $45.6 billion in operating income — more than the North America and International segments combined. Its operating margin stood at 35.4% for the full year, making it the profit engine that funds Amazon’s aggressive expansion into AI, logistics, and media.
Amazon’s advertising business also emerged as a significant force, growing 22% year-over-year in 2025, with Q4 advertising revenue alone reaching $21.3 billion. The advertising business is almost entirely high-margin, benefiting from Amazon’s unique position as a platform where consumers are actively shopping — making it arguably the most valuable ad inventory in digital commerce.
How AWS and AI Drove the Revenue Milestone
AWS: From Cost Center to Crown Jewel
When Amazon Web Services launched publicly in 2006, few could have predicted it would one day generate more operating income than the entire North American retail operation. In Q4 2025, AWS grew 24% year-over-year to $35.6 billion in quarterly revenue — its fastest growth rate in 13 consecutive quarters. The acceleration is being driven almost entirely by enterprise demand for AI infrastructure.
AWS’s custom silicon strategy is central to this story. Amazon’s Trainium (AI training chips) and Graviton (general-purpose cloud CPUs) product lines reached a combined annual revenue run rate of over $10 billion in 2025, growing at triple-digit percentages year-over-year. Trainium2, fully subscribed with 1.4 million chips deployed, powers Project Rainier — the world’s largest operational AI compute cluster, built in partnership with Anthropic, the AI safety company in which Amazon has committed up to $4 billion. Trainium3 is already in production, and Trainium4 is slated for 2027 delivery.
This custom chip investment is not incidental. It is the foundation of Amazon’s competitive moat against Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud in the AI infrastructure race. AWS currently holds approximately 31% of the global cloud infrastructure market (as of the most recent Synergy Research Group data), ahead of Azure at 25% and Google Cloud at around 11%.
AI Is Now a Revenue Line, Not Just a Feature
Amazon’s AI ambitions extend well beyond selling GPU cycles. Rufus, the company’s agentic AI shopping assistant, was used by more than 300 million customers in 2025, contributing nearly $12 billion in incremental annualized sales. The assistant can browse tens of millions of items across external stores, make purchases on behalf of customers, and adapt recommendations based on conversational context — capabilities that sit at the frontier of what consumer-facing AI can do.
Amazon Bedrock, the company’s managed foundation model platform, is now used by over 100,000 companies. In Q4 2025 alone, Amazon expanded Bedrock to include models from OpenAI, Google, NVIDIA, Mistral AI, and over 20 other providers, alongside Amazon’s own Nova model family. This multi-model marketplace positions AWS as infrastructure-agnostic — a cloud provider that can power whatever AI model a customer prefers rather than betting exclusively on its own models.
Amazon Connect, the company’s AI-powered contact center platform, crossed a $1 billion annualized revenue run rate in 2025 and is growing over 30%, handling more than 20 million interactions per day.
How Does Amazon Compare to Walmart in 2025?
Beyond raw revenue, the two companies diverge sharply in nearly every structural dimension:
| Metric | Amazon (FY2025) | Walmart (FY2025) |
|---|---|---|
| Total Revenue | $716.9 billion | $713.2 billion |
| Operating Income | $80.0 billion | $29.3 billion |
| Net Income | $77.7 billion | $19.4 billion |
| Employees | ~1.58 million | ~2.1 million |
| CapEx (2025) | $131.8 billion | ~$17 billion (est.) |
| Primary Revenue Source | Services + Cloud | Retail stores |
Amazon’s operating income of $80 billion — nearly three times Walmart’s $29.3 billion — reflects the difference in business model quality. Walmart operates on thin retail margins; Amazon operates a diversified portfolio where high-margin cloud and advertising businesses subsidize lower-margin retail operations.
It is worth noting that Walmart’s fiscal year ends January 31, while Amazon’s ends December 31. The comparison uses the most recent full-year figures for each company as of February 2026 at time of writing.
Why Amazon’s $200 Billion Capex Bet Changes Everything
Perhaps the most consequential number in Amazon’s Q4 earnings release is not the $716.9 billion in revenue — it is the $200 billion in planned capital expenditures for 2026. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy disclosed this figure alongside the results, calling AI a “once in a generation” business opportunity. The 2025 capex was already $131.8 billion, a 65% increase over the prior year, driven “primarily by investments in artificial intelligence.”
To put that figure in context: $200 billion is nearly Walmart’s entire annual revenue. It dwarfs Google’s announced 2025 capex of $75 billion and Microsoft’s announced capex plans. It signals that Amazon views the infrastructure layer of AI — data centers, custom silicon, networking, and energy — as a winner-take-most market, and is placing a maximalist bet on owning it.
This spending also tightens the relationship between AWS’s growth rate and Amazon’s overall financial health. As Jassy noted in the Q4 release, free cash flow decreased to $11.2 billion in 2025 from $38.2 billion in 2024 — not because the business is struggling, but because every available dollar of operating cash flow is being plowed into infrastructure. Amazon is deliberately sacrificing near-term free cash flow for long-term AI positioning.
Automation and Logistics: The Retail Side of the AI Revolution
While AWS gets much of the attention, Amazon’s AI investments are also transforming its retail operations in measurable ways. In 2025, the company delivered 70% more items on the same day compared to 2024. Same-day delivery is now available to nearly 100 million customers. Same-day grocery delivery has expanded to more than 2,300 cities and towns across the United States. Pharmacy same-day delivery now covers 3,000+ U.S. cities.
This logistics acceleration is powered by robotics, machine learning-optimized routing, and an increasingly automated fulfillment network. The same AI investment that makes AWS competitive in the cloud also makes Amazon faster and cheaper to operate as a retailer — a compounding advantage that is difficult for pure-play competitors to replicate.
Amazon’s international segment also grew 13% to $161.9 billion in 2025, with Amazon Now ultra-fast delivery (30 minutes or less) now operating in cities across India, Mexico, the UAE, and testing in the U.S. and UK.
Why This Milestone Matters for the Broader Tech Industry
Amazon’s ascent to the top of the global revenue rankings confirms a structural reality: the most valuable businesses of the AI era are not those that move the most physical goods, but those that own the infrastructure, data, and distribution that AI runs on.
Google’s Alphabet crossed $400 billion in annual revenue for the first time in 2025, driven by a $70 billion cloud run rate and YouTube’s $60 billion-plus in ad revenue. Microsoft’s Azure continues to grow rapidly. But Amazon’s combination of cloud infrastructure leadership, an AI chip roadmap, a captive consumer base, and an advertising platform built on purchase intent gives it a structural position that none of its competitors fully replicate.
The transition from Walmart to Amazon at the top of the global revenue rankings is not a data point — it is a verdict. The company that built the most powerful AI infrastructure layer, combined it with the world’s largest e-commerce operation, and used machine learning to make both faster and cheaper has become the world’s largest enterprise by revenue. What comes next — the $200 billion capex cycle, Trainium’s expansion, Alexa+‘s rollout — will determine whether Amazon extends that lead or begins to face structural limits of its own.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: How much revenue did Amazon make in 2025? A: Amazon posted $716.9 billion in total net sales for fiscal year 2025 (ending December 31, 2025), representing a 12% increase from $638.0 billion in 2024. This figure was disclosed in Amazon’s Q4 2025 earnings release on February 5, 2026.
Q: Did Amazon surpass Walmart in revenue? A: Yes. Amazon’s 2025 revenue of $716.9 billion exceeded Walmart’s fiscal year 2025 revenue of $713.2 billion (for the period ending January 31, 2025), making Amazon the world’s largest company by revenue as of early 2026 at time of writing.
Q: How much revenue does AWS generate? A: AWS generated $128.7 billion in revenue for full-year 2025, a 20% increase year-over-year. In Q4 2025 alone, AWS posted $35.6 billion in quarterly revenue, growing 24% — its fastest growth rate in 13 quarters. AWS operating income for 2025 was $45.6 billion at a 35.4% operating margin.
Q: How much is Amazon investing in AI? A: Amazon spent $131.8 billion on capital expenditures in 2025, primarily driven by AI infrastructure investments. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy disclosed plans to invest approximately $200 billion in capex across Amazon in 2026, with the majority directed toward AWS, AI, and custom chip development.
Q: What was Amazon’s profit in 2025? A: Amazon reported $77.7 billion in net income for fiscal year 2025, up from $39.9 billion in 2024. Operating income reached $80.0 billion, with AWS contributing $45.6 billion of that total at its industry-leading 35.4% operating margin.