AWS posts fastest growth in four years as AI spending reshapes the cloud wars

Amazon Web Services just posted its best growth quarter in nearly four years, and the reason is exactly what you’d expect: everyone suddenly needs a lot more compute power to run AI workloads. The cloud giant reported Q1 FY2026 revenue of $37.6 billion, a 28% jump year-over-year, with record operating margins of 13.1%.

That’s the fastest AWS has grown in 15 quarters.

The numbers behind the AI gold rush

AWS now carries an annualized revenue run rate of $150 billion. AWS’s revenue run rate for AI-related services has surpassed $15 billion.

Amazon has outlined capital expenditure plans approaching $200 billion for 2026, with the lion’s share directed at AI infrastructure. That includes new data centers, proprietary chips like Trainium and Graviton, and Project Rainier, a large-scale AI compute cluster designed to handle the most demanding workloads.