Amazon's $62.6 Billion Profit Wasn't Really Amazon's. Anthropic Was.

News Breakdown · FiscEdge Academy

Amazon's Q2 2026 earnings, released Thursday, look like the best quarter in the company's history on paper. Net sales hit $200.6 billion, up 20% year over year and the first time Amazon has crossed $200 billion in a single quarter. Net income more than tripled to $62.6 billion, up from $18.2 billion a year earlier, and diluted EPS of $5.75 blew past the roughly $1.90 Wall Street expected. The stock jumped more than 9% in after-hours trading.

Look one line lower in the filing and the story changes. Of that $62.6 billion in net income, $53.4 billion was a non-operating, pre-tax gain, driven almost entirely by the rising valuation of Amazon's stake in Anthropic. Strip that out and Amazon's actual operating income for the quarter was $27.5 billion, up a still-solid 43%, but nowhere near "profit tripled" territory.

The revenue beat is the least interesting part of this report. The more useful number is how much of Amazon's headline profit came from a stock position, not from selling anything.

Where the $53.4 billion actually came from

Amazon has invested roughly $13 billion in Anthropic to date, part of a commitment that could grow further. Anthropic isn't public, so Amazon doesn't get a daily stock price for that stake. Instead, under standard accounting rules, Amazon has to re-mark the position to fair value each quarter based on the company's most recent private funding activity. Anthropic's Series H round in May valued it at roughly $965 billion, and it confidentially filed for an IPO in June. Both events pushed Amazon's mark on its stake sharply higher, and that re-mark flowed straight through the income statement as a one-time, non-cash gain.

This is the same mechanic that produced Microsoft's $3.2 billion Anthropic-related gain in its own earnings this week, just an order of magnitude larger, because Amazon's stake and Anthropic's valuation jump were both bigger. Two hyperscalers, two quarters, two reminders that "AI lab valuation" is now something that shows up on public companies' income statements before either lab ever rings a bell on an exchange.

The part of the report that's actually about the business

Strip out the Anthropic mark and the operating story is still strong. AWS revenue grew 37% to $42.2 billion, its fastest growth since 2021 and well ahead of the 31% analysts expected, with operating margin at 39.4%. Amazon said its AI and custom chip businesses have each crossed $25 billion in annualized revenue, more than doubling year over year.

The catch is what it's costing to get there. CEO Andy Jassy raised full-year 2026 capital expenditure guidance from $200 billion to $220 billion, citing higher memory chip prices, and said that even at that spending level, AWS still won't have enough capacity to meet demand, a dynamic he expects to persist into 2027 and possibly 2028. Amazon also guided Q3 revenue to $197-202 billion, below the $204 billion analysts wanted, a sign that even Amazon is being careful about what it promises next.

What this changes for founders

• Don't read "record profit" headlines at face value. When a company holds equity in a fast-appreciating private AI lab, a big chunk of reported net income can be a paper mark, not cash from operations. If you're pitching investors or benchmarking against a "comparable" public company, look at operating income, not the net income headline.
• Cloud capacity is still the bottleneck, not the budget. Amazon just added $20 billion to its spending plan and is still telling customers demand will outstrip supply for at least another year or two. If your roadmap depends on cheap, abundant GPU capacity arriving soon, this quarter is evidence to plan otherwise.
• Hyperscaler earnings are now a live AI-lab valuation feed. Between Microsoft's Anthropic and OpenAI marks last quarter and Amazon's this quarter, the clearest public signal on what the frontier labs are actually worth is arriving via 10-Qs, not funding-round press releases. Worth tracking if you're raising against an "AI-native" narrative.

If you remember one thing

Amazon's headline profit tripled, but $53.4 billion of that $62.6 billion was a paper gain on its Anthropic stake, not revenue from running the business, a reminder to always separate what a company earned from what its portfolio happened to be worth this quarter, especially now that AI stakes are big enough to swing a hyperscaler's entire bottom line.

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We teach how to read a filing like this one, separating operating performance from one-time marks, in FiscEdge's financial modeling course. For the fundamentals behind numbers like operating margin and EPS, see our explainer on unit economics. If your product runs on cloud infrastructure, AI for entrepreneurs covers how to plan around capacity constraints like AWS's. Browse the full blog for more breakdowns. Follow @fiscedge for daily Business & AI analysis.