Amazon revenue soars as AI investments pay off - Axios
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- Amazon beat Q2 earnings expectations as revenue soared and the company's AI investments began paying off, per Axios's framing of the results.
- Amazon raised its 2026 capital expenditure guidance to $220 billion, explicitly citing higher memory costs as the driver of the increase, per CNBC.
- Amazon shares jumped after the report as AWS cloud sales growth accelerated, per WSJ.
- Amazon simultaneously ramped cloud spending alongside the revenue gains, with WSJ framing the quarter as one where both cloud sales and spending accelerated in tandem.
Why it matters: Amazon shareholders got the earnings beat and a stock pop, but the $220 billion 2026 capex figure — a massive jump explicitly tied to higher memory costs — signals that AI infrastructure is getting materially more expensive to build, and Amazon is committing to absorb that bill through 2026.
