Amazon share price moved after AWS grew 28%, its fastest pace in 15 quarters, as the company reported first-quarter earnings and revenue above Wall Street estimates. The stock initially rose, then fell as much as 7% before recovering near Wednesday’s closing level.
Amazon posted earnings per share of $2.78 on revenue of $181.5 billion, topping analysts’ expectations of $1.62 a share on $177.2 billion in sales. For shareholders, that meant the quarter delivered both a profit beat and a sales beat, while also giving the market a fresh check on whether Amazon’s AI spending was feeding through to its cloud unit.
AWS, Chips and Stores
AWS generated $37.6 billion in revenue, and revenue excluding foreign exchange grew 28% in the quarter. Andy Jassy said, “AWS is growing 28% (our fastest growth in 15 quarters) on a very large base, our chips business topped a $20 billion revenue run rate (growing triple digits year-over-year), Advertising grew to over $70 billion in TTM [trailing 12-month] revenue, and unit growth in our Stores reached 15% (the highest since the tail end of covid lockdowns),” linking the cloud acceleration to broader momentum across Amazon’s businesses.
$17.2 billion in advertising revenue, $64.3 billion in online store sales and $41.6 billion in third-party seller services showed the scale behind that growth. Amazon’s combination of cloud, ads and commerce gave the quarter more breadth than a single-line AWS update, and the 15% unit growth in Stores was the clearest sign that the retailer side is still contributing alongside the higher-margin businesses.
Cash Flow and AI Spending
$1.2 billion in trailing 12-month free cash flow marked a sharp drop from $25.9 billion for the period ended March 31, 2025, driven primarily by a $59.3 billion year-over-year increase in property and equipment purchases. That spending load is the friction point in the story: Amazon is pushing harder into AI infrastructure even as the cash profile weakens.
$194 billion to $199 billion in second-quarter revenue guidance and $20 billion to $24 billion in operating income set a high bar for the next print. Amazon also said OpenAI committed to consume about 2 gigawatts of Trainium capacity through AWS beginning in 2027, Anthropic secured up to 5 gigawatts of current and future generations of Amazon’s Trainium chips, and Meta signed a deal to deploy tens of millions of AWS Graviton cores.
Amazon’s share-price reaction shows the market is still testing the same question through the numbers: whether the capital outlay can keep translating into faster AWS growth without erasing the cash generation investors expected from the franchise.
