The numbers come first.
Amazon Web Services generated $42.2 billion in revenue in its most recent second quarter, a 37.6% jump from a year earlier—the division's fastest growth rate in 18 quarters and the fifth consecutive quarter of acceleration, the company reported Thursday.
AWS added more than $4.6 billion in revenue sequentially, roughly 80% more than its previous largest quarterly increase ever. The division is now running at a $169 billion annualized clip, and the customer backlog stands at $496 billion. Amazon's stock surged more than 15% on Friday.
On the earnings call, CEO Andy Jassy told analysts he now believes AWS will 'very possibly be a $1 trillion annual revenue business for us in time.' He also disclosed that Amazon's capital expenditures will reach $220 billion in 2026.
William Blair analysts called AWS growth 'astounding' in a Friday note, adding that Amazon's 'track record, high AWS margins, and accelerating growth' make the market 'likely to react more favorably to the raised capex guide than feared.'
The mechanism behind the acceleration.
Jassy told investors that roughly 85% of global IT spending is currently directed at on-premise company servers—an equation he said 'is going to flip in the next 10 to 20 years.' The shift is already compressing that timeline.
The PGA Tour offers a ground-level illustration. Not long ago, the Tour shipped its own servers on trucks to golf courses each week—loading racks of computer equipment, rigging scoreboards, running the data operation, then tearing it down and doing it all over again in a new city. 'The PGA Tour is a traveling circus,' said David Provan, the Tour's vice president of digital architecture. 'We don't play inside a set of white lines.'
When the Tour opened new global headquarters roughly five years ago, it built no fixed IT infrastructure and instead migrated everything to AWS—its ShotLink ball-tracking system, media archive, website, mobile app, and data distribution systems. Provan said the Tour then layered AI on top of that cloud foundation.
Today the Tour runs an agentic AI platform on Amazon Bedrock to generate betting profiles for each week's tournament field—roughly 150 profiles in about nine minutes, according to Provan. At the 2025 Players Championship, the Tour launched AI-generated commentary: a two-sentence summary for each of the 32,000 shots hit during the tournament. In 2026, it debuted what Provan called 'agentic production'—a fully automated television broadcast with camera selection and graphics driven by ShotLink data.
Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky captured the broader pattern on the call: 'Increasingly, customers seeking the full benefits of AI are accelerating their transition to the cloud. As customers invest in AI, we see a corresponding increase in core consumption.'
Provan noted the Tour's own framing has evolved: the internal mantra is no longer that the company has AI projects, but that it has projects that use AI.
CEO Times take.
This is what free-enterprise capital allocation looks like when the incentives are right. AWS is not growing because of a government mandate or a subsidy—it is growing because businesses from a traveling golf tour to Fortune 500 enterprises are voting with their IT budgets for a platform that cuts fixed costs, scales on demand, and now delivers AI as a utility layer on top.
The $496 billion customer backlog is the market's verdict. When companies are free to move capital toward productivity rather than maintain aging server rooms, the result is compounding growth that rewrites quarterly records. Jassy's $1 trillion target is a forecast, not a guarantee—but the trajectory of five consecutive acceleration quarters makes it the most credible number in enterprise technology today.
