The Quarter in Brief
Amazon.com reported its third quarter of 2026, the three months ended September 30, after the US market closed on Thursday, October 29. Net sales were $201.94 billion, up 12% from $180.17 billion a year earlier and in line with the S&P analysts' consensus of $202.3 billion published by StockStory. Diluted earnings per share were $1.89, down from $1.95 a year earlier and below the consensus of $1.96. Amazon attributes the fall mainly to $9.5 billion of pre-tax gains on its Anthropic investments in the year-earlier quarter.
What set the quarter apart was AWS, Amazon's cloud computing business, whose sales rose 39% to $45.98 billion, its fastest growth in nearly five years and the sixth quarter in a row that growth has quickened. Operating income, the profit from the business itself before interest and tax, rose 61% to $28.08 billion, a margin of 13.9% that Amazon calls its highest ever. The online store grew more slowly: Prime Day fell in the second quarter this year in most large countries, against the third quarter in 2025, and Amazon estimates that took about 4 percentage points off the quarter's sales growth.