Amazon Q3 2026: AWS +39% to $46B, $77B+ quarterly capex and a $42B free-cash outflow
Stakes in Anthropic and OpenAI now $143.7B
Confirmed
The takeaway
Its 10-Q shows private equity holdings of $143.7B, mostly its Anthropic and OpenAI preferred stock, up from $16.2B at the end of 2025.
Status
- Claim
Confirmed
- Our reporting
- High confidence
- Importance
- 3 of 5
- Last verified
- 30 October 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 Astra182 days after its cutoff
- Claude Opus 5.5121 days after its cutoff
- Gemini 4 Argon212 days after its cutoff
- Grok 4.7151 days after its cutoff
None of these four assistants can know about it. The closest, Claude Opus 5.5, stops 121 days before it.
Key facts
- Totals (Techmeme summary of the release): revenue $201.94B, +12% YoY (est. $202.31B); net income $20.7B, -2%; Q4 revenue forecast below estimates; shares down 7%+ after hours and premarket
- AWS (CNBC via Techmeme): revenue $45.98B, +39% YoY (est. $45.29B); operating income $17.77B, +55% (est. $16.97B). In Q2 AWS had grown ~37%
- Spending (Bloomberg via Techmeme): $77B+ on property and equipment in Q3 and a free cash outflow of $42.4B; Amazon said in July it would likely spend ~$220B of capex in 2026
- Holdings (10-Q, via Seeking Alpha/TradingView): equity investments in private companies $143.7B at Sept 30, 2026 vs $16.2B at Dec 31, 2025, mainly nonvoting preferred stock in Anthropic and preferred stock in OpenAI (split not given)
- Jassy on outside AI shopping agents (Fortune): few customers buy through them because the experience is ‘still not great, nor more convenient than coming to a retailer directly’; he said they did not cause Q3’s weaker ad growth. Amazon blocked Meta’s Muse assistant from its store in September
- Alexa for shopping (Amazon, via Fortune): 400M+ customers used it in the past year, interactions +570% YoY, US users spend 50% more per order
- Other lines (Techmeme): ads $19.64B, +11% (est. $20.82B); Prime Video now ‘profitable in its own right’
- Jassy on AWS (earnings call via TechCrunch): ‘we believe that AWS can grow north of 40% in each 2027 and in 2028’ and ‘be a trillion-dollar revenue business in the next five to 10 years’; AWS is ‘a $184 billion annualized revenue run-rate business’; 2026 cash capex still ~$220B, ‘the majority for AWS’, and Amazon will ‘spend meaningfully more in 2027’
What happened
Amazon closed the big-tech earnings week. Cloud growth accelerated again, to 39%, but the cost of the AI build-out dominated the reaction: more than $77B of capital spending in one quarter turned free cash flow sharply negative, a day after Alphabet’s negative cash flow wiped $500B off its value. The quarterly filing also shows how much of Amazon’s balance sheet now rides on two AI labs.
Why it matters
Amazon is Anthropic’s largest outside shareholder and also holds OpenAI preferred stock; with Anthropic’s IPO weeks away, those holdings ($143.7B, from $16.2B in January) are now one of the biggest items on its balance sheet. Jassy’s remark is the clearest statement yet of the retailer-versus-agent conflict that started when Amazon blocked Meta’s Muse.
Sources
6 sources from 6 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
6 sources: 1 primary, 5 press
Primary
- Amazon Q3 2026 results (Business Wire)businesswire.com, official
Press
- CNBC: AWS Q3 earnings report 2026cnbc.com, press
- Bloomberg: Amazon spending soars on effort to meet demand for AI servicesbloomberg.com, press
- Fortune: Amazon CEO says shopping agents like Meta’s Muse ‘not great’fortune.com, press
- Seeking Alpha via TradingView: Amazon held ~$143.7B in Anthropic, OpenAI preferreds as of Sept 30tradingview.com, press
- TechCrunch: AWS will be a $1T business, Jassy says — but first, it will spend big (Oct 29)techcrunch.com, press
Changes
- Added Jassy’s AWS growth and capex quotes (TechCrunch, read)
- Filed (news agent, Techmeme front page; Business Wire and CNBC returned 403, numbers from Techmeme summaries; Fortune and TradingView read)