Amazon topped the 2026 Fortune Global 500 this week, ending Walmart’s 12-year run at the top of the list of the world’s largest companies by revenue. Fortune credited record revenue growth and Amazon’s massive bet on AI infrastructure as the key drivers behind the shift.
Amazon’s revenue eclipsed $700 billion in 2025, a 12% jump that pushed it past Walmart, State Grid, UnitedHealth Group, and Saudi Aramco. The company plans to spend roughly $200 billion on capital expenditures in 2026, up from $131 billion in 2025, largely directed at AWS and generative AI — putting it at the top of a Big Tech AI capex race that analysts expect to exceed $700 billion across the largest hyperscalers this year, according to Fortune’s reporting.
The bet behind the spending
Executive Chair Jeff Bezos, featured on Fortune’s August/September cover, called Amazon’s custom Trainium and Graviton chips “the foundation upon which all of this AI sits” — a direct challenge to Nvidia and AMD’s dominance of AI accelerator hardware. Amazon’s next-generation Trainium4 chip is due next year. The company has also structured its AI bets to feed its own cloud business: its roughly $25 billion investment in Anthropic came paired with a commitment from Anthropic to purchase more than $100 billion of Amazon’s cloud services over time.
From skepticism to conviction on Wall Street
The turnaround in sentiment has been notably fast. Bernstein analyst Mark Shmulik described AWS as being “in last place in AI” as recently as October 2025; by January 2026, he’d named Amazon a top pick for the year. AWS revenue reached $37.59 billion in Q1 2026, up 28% year-over-year — its fastest growth in 15 quarters — at a 37.7% operating margin, giving Amazon’s capex a revenue growth story to point to that not every hyperscaler can currently match.
What to watch next
- Whether Amazon’s 2026 capex guidance holds or gets revised upward again, a pattern that’s repeated across most hyperscalers this year.
- How Trainium4’s 2027 launch affects Amazon’s negotiating position with Nvidia on future GPU purchases.
- Whether AWS’s growth rate sustains through the rest of 2026 as the AI capex-versus-revenue debate continues across the sector.
Related reading
- Big Tech’s $725 Billion AI Bet: What Alphabet, Microsoft, and Meta’s Earnings Reveal
- Meta Is in Talks to Rent $10 Billion of Its GPUs to Rival Anthropic
Sources
- No. 1 on the Fortune Global 500: Amazon’s Jeff Bezos on how his garage startup became the largest company in the world by revenue — Fortune
- Fortune Announces 2026 Fortune Global 500 List — PR Newswire
- Amazon and Microsoft are spending $400 billion on AI—and investors are low on patience — Fortune
Disclaimer: This content is meant to inform and should not be considered financial advice. The views expressed in this article may include the author’s personal opinions and do not represent Times Tabloid’s opinion. Readers are advised to conduct thorough research before making any investment decisions. Any action taken by the reader is strictly at their own risk. Times Tabloid is not responsible for any financial losses.
