SEATTLE — Amazon‘s sales climbed in the third quarter, up 12% to $201.9 billion, the company said Thursday. Its cloud unit had its best growth in nearly five years. Its cash, after the bills for artificial intelligence, went the other way.
AWS took in $46 billion in the quarter. Growth was 39.3%. Run that pace for a year and the unit is a $184 billion business. AWS made $17.8 billion in operating income. A year earlier, it made $11.4 billion.
Companywide operating income came to $28.1 billion, against $17.4 billion a year ago. Its operating margin was 13.9%. Amazon has never reported a higher one.
Net income fell. It was $20.7 billion. Per diluted share, that is $1.89, down from $1.95 a share — $21.2 billion in all — in the same quarter last year. The comparison is not clean. Last year’s quarter carried $9.5 billion in pre-tax gains, counted as non-operating income, from Amazon’s stakes in Anthropic.
North America remained the biggest piece. Sales there rose 6% to $112.9 billion. Segment operating income jumped to $8.7 billion from $4.8 billion, close to double. Overseas, the numbers were smaller. Sales of $43.1 billion were up 5% — 8% without currency swings — and operating income rose a little, to $1.6 billion from $1.2 billion.
Prime Day did not help the year-over-year math. This year the sale ran in the second quarter in most large countries. Last year it was all in the third. Amazon said growth would have been roughly 400 basis points stronger without the shift. Currency changes took $0.9 billion off the total. Without them, sales grew 13%.
Then there is the spending. Operating cash flow over the last 12 months rose 29%, to $168.3 billion. Free cash flow, over the same stretch, was an outflow of $42.4 billion. A year earlier it was an inflow of $14.8 billion. The gap is the build-out. Purchases of property and equipment, net of proceeds from sales and incentives, jumped $94.8 billion from a year earlier, and Amazon said the increase primarily reflects investments in artificial intelligence.
“Our AWS investment in functionality and infrastructure is working, with over 39% year-over-year revenue growth in Q3 ($184 billion revenue run rate) and projected revenue growth rates of over 40% both in 2027 and in 2028,”
What Amazon expects next is a bigger holiday quarter. It put fourth-quarter sales at $240 billion to $247 billion, growth of 12% to 16%, with about 60 basis points lost to currency. Operating income should be $28.5 billion to $33.5 billion, against $25 billion last year. The spending plan did not change. Cash capital expenditures for 2026 are still put at about $220 billion.
Investors did not cheer. Shares fell more than 7% after hours, Reuters reported, and the news agency said the fourth-quarter revenue forecast sat largely below Wall Street estimates.
Amazon executives were due to take questions on a webcast call at 5 p.m. ET on Thursday.
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