Amazon turned in one of its strongest quarters in years on Thursday, with Amazon Web Services growing at its fastest pace in nearly five years and the company's overall operating margin hitting a record high, according to Amazon's own earnings release for the quarter ended September 30.

Net sales came in at $201.9 billion, up 12% from $180.2 billion a year earlier (13% excluding currency swings). But the number that had Wall Street buzzing was AWS: the cloud division posted $46.0 billion in revenue, up 39% year over year, pushing its annualized run rate to $184 billion. Amazon called it the unit's fastest growth in nearly five years, a notable claim given how aggressively AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud have all been racing to build out AI infrastructure.

A Record Margin, With an Asterisk

Company-wide operating income hit $28.1 billion, up from $17.4 billion a year ago, for an operating margin of 13.9% — the highest in Amazon's history. Net income, however, actually dipped slightly to $20.7 billion from $21.2 billion, a quirk explained by a one-time windfall: last year's Q3 included $9.5 billion in pre-tax paper gains from Amazon's investment in AI startup Anthropic that didn't repeat this time around. Diluted earnings per share landed at $1.89, down from $1.95.

"OUR AWS INVESTMENT IN FUNCTIONALITY AND INFRASTRUCTURE IS WORKING."

CEO Andy Jassy struck a bullish tone on the earnings call, crediting the AWS surge to years of infrastructure spending finally paying off. He went further, predicting Amazon could have two separate trillion-dollar revenue businesses within five to ten years — a bold marker for a company whose total 2026 capital spending is already projected at roughly $220 billion, most of it chasing AI and cloud capacity.

For the current quarter, Amazon guided to net sales of $240.0 billion to $247.0 billion, implying 12% to 16% growth, and operating income between $28.5 billion and $33.5 billion — up from $25.0 billion in the same period last year. Options markets had been pricing in a swing of more than 7% in Amazon's stock in either direction once the numbers landed, a sign of how much was riding on the report.

The results land in the middle of a blockbuster week for Big Tech earnings, with Microsoft, Alphabet and Meta all also reporting results within days of each other as investors try to gauge whether the AI spending boom is translating into actual profit — or just a very expensive bet on the future.