Amazon said on Oct. 29 that sales at Amazon Web Services, or AWS, rose 39 percent from a year earlier to $46.0 billion in the three months to Sept. 30. AWS is Amazon's cloud business: other companies rent computing power, storage and databases from it over the internet instead of owning their own data centers and servers. Amazon says it was AWS's fastest growth in nearly five years. AWS's operating profit, what is left from its sales after the costs of running it, rose to $17.8 billion from $11.4 billion a year earlier.
The growth came with a surge in spending. In those three months alone, Amazon spent $77.3 billion on buildings and equipment, more than twice the $35.1 billion of a year earlier. Amazon tracks what is left over with a figure it calls free cash flow: the cash its business brings in, minus what it spends on buildings and equipment after what it gets back from selling property and from incentives. Over the 12 months to Sept. 30, its business brought in $168.3 billion in cash, but that spending, after what it got back, came to $210.7 billion, so free cash flow was minus $42.4 billion, against plus $14.8 billion a year earlier. Amazon says that was mainly because the spending was $94.8 billion higher than in the previous 12 months. It says the rise mostly reflects investment in AI.
The figure has fallen fast. It was plus $1.2 billion for the 12 months to March 31 and minus $7.6 billion for the 12 months to June 30. Amazon's long-term debt rose to $173.1 billion on Sept. 30 from $65.6 billion at the end of 2025. Amazon says it still expects to spend about $220 billion on buildings and equipment in 2026.
Amazon points to signs of demand for AI. It says Fortune 500 companies spent nearly seven times as much on Bedrock, its service for using AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic and other makers, as a year earlier. Andy Jassy, Amazon's chief executive, says AWS's sales are projected to grow more than 40 percent in both 2027 and 2028.
Amazon's total sales rose 12 percent to $201.9 billion, and its operating profit rose to $28.1 billion from $17.4 billion. Its net income fell to $20.7 billion from $21.2 billion, which Amazon says is mainly because the year-earlier quarter included $9.5 billion in gains, before taxes, on its investments in Anthropic, the maker of the Claude chatbot. Amazon's shares fell as much as 7 percent in trading after the market closed, according to a news report. The report says Jassy told analysts he expects spending on buildings and equipment to be "meaningfully more" in 2027 than in 2026, without giving a figure.
Amazon does not break out how much of AWS's sales come from AI.