Amazon Surpasses Walmart in Sales with AWS-Driven Growth

Amazon has surpassed Walmart in total sales, marking a significant milestone for the e-commerce giant. However, this achievement is largely due to its cloud computing division, Amazon Web Services (AWS), which generates 60% of the company's total operating income.

AWS represents just 21% of revenue but subsidizes various aspects of Amazon's business, including its warehouse network, Prime Video library, logistics apparatus, and free-delivery promises. Without AWS, the retail empire as it exists today could not be sustained on retail margins alone.

Amazon's advertising business has also become a significant contributor to the company's revenue, with first-half 2026 ad sales reaching $37 billion, up 25% year-over-year. This places Amazon alongside Google and Meta as one of the three dominant digital ad platforms globally.

The growth case for Amazon has genuine friction, however. Over the past five years, Amazon stock gained 47%, well below the S&P 500's pace. At a market capitalization of $2.7 trillion, much of the projected growth is already priced in. Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud are competing aggressively for enterprise cloud accounts, spending at comparable scale.

Amazon captures 40% of all US e-commerce spending, a concentration that has drawn sustained antitrust scrutiny in Washington and Brussels. European regulators have challenged the company's dual role as both marketplace operator and direct competitor to its own sellers, a structural conflict that could reshape margins in ways consensus models do not account for.