Amazon Surpasses Walmart in Annual Sales as AWS Seals $1 Billion Intelligence Cloud Initiative

Amazon has crossed a watershed moment in retail history, but its future may be written in the cloud. The company’s trailing twelve-month revenue now stands at roughly $742.8 billion—a 14.2% expansion that has allowed it to edge past Walmart for the first time by that measure. While Walmart remains the dominant force in brick-and-mortar, Amazon’s blend of global e-commerce, third-party marketplace, and high-margin cloud services has overtaken the legendary retailer in total volume. The shift is reflected in market capitalisation: Amazon’s has swelled to around $2.6 trillion, while Walmart’s stock has recently sagged after price-cut announcements and a downgrade from Erste Group in June.

On the cloud side, the company is making a deeper play into a particularly sensitive market. Early July saw Amazon Web Services launch the IC Accelerated Modernization Framework (ICAMF), a $1 billion program that extends cloud credits to U.S. intelligence agencies through October 2030. The aim is to drag aging government IT onto Amazon’s infrastructure. Separately, AWS unveiled its Secret Cloud for Industry, a dedicated high-security environment for defence contractors running classified workloads, with Northrop Grumman as the inaugural partner. The move signals that Amazon is prepared to compete on security, not just price, for government business.

The stock has responded positively to the broader picture. Shares currently trade at €217.10, up 1.71% from the prior close of €213.45, and have gained roughly 4% over the past week. Since the start of the year, the equity has climbed 12.3%, though it remains 8.80% below its 52-week high of €238.05 set on May 5. The distance from the February low of €165.88 is nearly 31%. Technical indicators lean neutral: the relative strength index sits at 55.6, the stock is a hair below its 50-day moving average (1.15%) but comfortably above the 200-day line by 8%, and 30-day annualised volatility hovers around 31%. The price-to-earnings ratio stands at roughly 29, a level well below historic peaks.

Morgan Stanley strategist Michael Wilson argues that a rotation is underway that favours Amazon. “The next phase of the AI investment cycle should focus on companies providing infrastructure and services for broad deployment—not just chip makers,” Wilson wrote. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index has fallen more than 11% since its June high, while capital appears to be flowing toward cloud providers that can deliver scale and services. AWS’s own growth underpins the thesis: the cloud division expanded 28% in the first quarter of 2026, reinforcing Amazon’s positioning as a more defensive, growth-oriented alternative to volatile hardware plays.

Should investors sell immediately? Or is it worth buying Amazon?

On the retail front, Amazon is addressing shifting consumer behaviour head-on. Its recent Prime Day event in late June drove U.S. online spending across the entire industry to $26.4 billion on the first day alone—the biggest e-commerce day of the year to date. The company is extending the momentum with “Amazon Haul,” a new tier offering deeper discounts on lower-priced items. The move is a direct response to lingering inflation, which ran at about 4.2% last year, and positions the company to challenge both traditional wholesalers and emerging budget-focused e-commerce rivals. In markets such as Australia, Prime Day actions are already live, with additional countries scheduled through mid-July.

Investors, however, are keeping one eye on the cost side. Amazon’s cumulative investment plan for AI and cloud infrastructure has crossed the $200 billion mark, sparking debate about the eventual return on such spending. The company counters with a liquidity reserve of roughly $143 billion, which it says will cover these commitments without straining the capital structure. On the product side, AWS has strengthened its generative AI arsenal: Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 model has returned to Amazon Bedrock, handling complex coding and knowledge tasks with autonomous self-checking capabilities.

Amazon is slated to report its next quarterly results at the end of July 2026. Analysts expect earnings per share of around $1.82. The focus will be on whether the company can sustain its margin expansion in cloud services even as logistics costs in retail continue to climb. For now, the dual story—retail dominance now measurable against Walmart’s, and a deepening grip on high-security government cloud work—gives Amazon a narrative that few peers can match. The capital rotation Wilson describes will be the final test of whether that narrative translates into sustained valuation gains.