Amazon shares plunged 8% Friday after the company posted mixed fourth-quarter earnings and boosted its 2026 spending forecast to $200 billion.
Here’s how the company did, compared with estimates from analysts polled by LSEG:
- Earnings per share: $1.95 vs. $1.97 estimated
- Revenue: $213.39 billion vs. $211.33 billion estimated
Wall Street was also looking at other key revenue numbers:
- Amazon Web Services: $35.58 billion vs. $34.93 billion expected, according to StreetAccount
- Advertising: $21.32 billion vs. $21.16 billion expected, according to StreetAccount
Amazon said it expects capital expenditures to continue to climb higher this year as it aggressively invests in data centers and other infrastructure to meet a surge in artificial intelligence demand.
The company projected capex to hit $200 billion this year, while analysts were expecting $146.6 billion, according to FactSet. Amazon’s capital expenditures were roughly $131 billion in 2025.
“With such strong demand for our existing offerings and seminal opportunities like AI, chips, robotics, low earth orbit satellites, we expect to invest about $200 billion in capital expenditures across Amazon in 2026, and anticipate strong long-term return on invested capital,” CEO Andy Jassy said in a statement.
During a conference call with investors, Jassy said that spending would “predominantly” go to AWS, where non-AI workloads are “growing at a faster rate than we anticipated.” Last October, Amazon opened its $11 billion AI data center called Project Rainier, built exclusively to run workloads from Anthropic.
Amazon one-day stock chart.
“We have very high demand,” Jassy said. “Customers really want AWS for core and AI workloads, and we’re monetizing capacity as fast as we can install it.”
Tech companies have laid out aggressive spending plans on artificial intelligence, committing to invest billions. Google parent Alphabet said Wednesday it expects to spend between $175 billion and $185 billion in 2026, while Meta said its capital expenditures could nearly double from last year to $115 billion to $135 billion.
Revenue in Amazon’s cloud computing unit expanded 24% during the fourth quarter, topping analysts’ estimates for 21.4% growth. Jassy said it was AWS’ “fastest growth in 13 quarters.”
While Amazon remains the cloud infrastructure leader, it has been trying to fight the perception that it’s losing ground to Google and Microsoft in the market. Last week, Microsoft Azure recorded growth of 39%, and Google’s cloud revenue increased about 48%, the fastest growth since 2021, off smaller bases.
For the current quarter, Amazon said it expects sales to be between $173.5 billion and $178.5 billion, representing growth of 11% to 15%. Analysts polled by LSEG were expecting $175.6 billion.
Net income for the fourth quarter was $21.19 billion, or $1.95 per share, compared to $20 billion, or $1.86 per share, a year ago.
The results come as Amazon continues to downsize its head count. The company said last week it would lay off about 16,000 corporate employees, after cutting roughly 14,000 staffers last October.
Amazon had 1.57 million employees globally as of the end of December, an increase of 1% year over year. That figure is primarily comprised of its warehouse workforce.
The company’s advertising business continues to hum along. Revenue grew 23% year over year to $21.3 billion during the quarter.
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