Amazon's AI Edge Gives It a Growth Advantage Over Meta
Amazon and Meta are two of the largest technology companies investing heavily in artificial intelligence (AI). Amazon's AI strategy spans the full stack, from custom silicon to models and applications. AWS revenues grew 37% year over year in the second quarter, reaching a $169 billion annualized run rate. Its AI business and Amazon's chips business each surpassed a $25 billion annual revenue run rate.
AWS' growth is fueled by Amazon's full-stack AI portfolio, which includes Bedrock and Trainium. Anthropic and OpenAI have made multi-year, multi-gigawatt Trainium commitments. In addition, Amazon Bedrock customers spent more in the second quarter than in all prior quarters combined.
Alexa for Shopping active users nearly doubled, while advertising revenues grew 26% in the second quarter. Ads Agent expanded to 11 new countries this year, lowering costs for advertisers. Recent announcements reinforce this momentum, including the acquisition of DuckLabs and the general availability of Amazon Quick desktop app.
META's AI investments are strengthening its core advertising engine, backed by 3.6 billion daily users across its family of apps. Large language models now power content ranking and ad recommendations, while AI-powered Advantage+ solutions reached an annual revenue run rate of more than $75 billion.