Where Does Amazon Make Most of Its Profit? Not the Store

A box lands on your porch, and you paid Amazon for what's inside. But in 2025, Amazon's store businesses kept less than $6 of operating profit out of every $100 in sales, and that's with the ads and Prime fees counted in. Amazon Web Services, the part that rents out computers, brought in about 18% of Amazon's sales and 57% of its operating profit. Now some of the biggest new tenants in that rental business are AI companies Amazon has also invested in: Anthropic and OpenAI. In the quarter ended June 30, 2026, Amazon reported $27.5 billion in operating income and $62.6 billion in net income, largely because it marked up the value of its Anthropic stake on paper. And it plans to spend about $220 billion in 2026 on data centers, servers and warehouses. In this video: how thin the store's slice really is, where the ad money sits, how AWS became Amazon's landlord business, the circle of money between Amazon, Anthropic and OpenAI, what critics and Amazon's CEO say about the $200 billion bet, and what it all means for an ordinary retirement account. No investment advice, just how to read the reports. CHAPTERS 0:00 A box on the porch, and where the profit really is 1:26 The store that keeps a thin slice 4:43 The quiet money: ads and seller fees 9:56 The landlord: Amazon Web Services 12:39 The new tenants: Anthropic and OpenAI 17:14 The $200 billion bet 22:35 What it means for your money NOTES Operating income is what the businesses earn before interest, taxes and gains or losses on investments; net income can include paper gains on stakes like Amazon's in Anthropic. We say which one we mean. Annual figures are for 2025 (Amazon's fiscal year ends December 31); quarterly figures are for the quarter ended June 30, 2026. Amazon does not report the profit of its ad business or the current number of Prime members; where we use outside estimates, we name who made them. Anthropic's 2025 operating loss and 2026 revenue come from press reports on a draft IPO prospectus that is not public. Amazon admitted no wrongdoing in the 2025 FTC Prime settlement. Where a point is disputed, we say who says what. Figures are as of October 2026; later reports may change them. This video is for information only and is not investment advice. Brand names belong to their owners; all characters and scenes are our own illustration. SOURCES Amazon.com, Inc., annual report (10-K) for the fiscal year ended Dec. 31, 2025 Amazon.com, Inc., quarterly report (10-Q) for the quarter ended June 30, 2026 Amazon, "Amazon.com Announces Second Quarter Results," July 30, 2026 Amazon, "Amazon.com Announces First Quarter Results," April 29, 2026 Amazon, "Amazon.com Announces Fourth Quarter Results" (fiscal 2025) Amazon Q2 2026 earnings call, July 30, 2026 (transcript via The Motley Fool) Andy Jassy, 2025 letter to shareholders (Amazon, spring 2026) Amazon, Anthropic investment announcement Amazon.com, Inc., annual report (10-K) for fiscal 2015 Anthropic, "Anthropic and Amazon expand partnership," April 20, 2026 GeekWire, "Amazon invests $50B in OpenAI, deepens AWS partnership," 2026 (reported terms) Reuters, reporting on Anthropic's draft IPO prospectus, Sept. 28, 2026 The Wall Street Journal, reporting on Anthropic's draft IPO prospectus, Oct. 20, 2026 FTC, "FTC Secures Historic $2.5 Billion Settlement Against Amazon," Sept. 25, 2025 FTC, additional payments to consumers from the Amazon Prime settlement, Sept. 17, 2026 Associated Press (Sally Ho), on the $2.5 billion Prime settlement, Sept. 26, 2025 FTC, "FTC Sues Amazon for Illegally Maintaining Monopoly Power," Sept. 26, 2023 MLex, FTC v. Amazon trial date order, Oct. 9, 2026 Synergy Research Group, cloud market shares, Q2 2026, July 30, 2026 Gartner, worldwide IaaS public cloud market, 2024, Aug. 6, 2025 iShares Core S&P 500 ETF (IVV), holdings as of Oct. 22, 2026 Marketplace Pulse, "Amazon Takes a 50% Cut of Sellers' Revenue," Feb. 13, 2023 Dash, A., Ghosh, S., Mukherjee, A., Chakraborty, A., & Gummadi, K. P. (2024). Sponsored is the New Organic: Implications of Sponsored Results on Quality of Search Results in the Amazon Marketplace. Proceedings of the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society, 7, 316-327. doi:10.1609/aies.v7i1.31639 Moshary, S. (2025). Does Sponsored Search Advertising Augment Organic Search? Evidence from an E-Commerce Platform. Management Science, 71(11), 9687-9709. doi:10.1287/mnsc.2024.04792 David Cahn (Sequoia Capital), "AI's $600B Question," June 20, 2024 David Cahn, "AI's $1.5T Question," July 8, 2026 Goldman Sachs, "Gen AI: Too Much Spend, Too Little Benefit?," June 2024 (via 404 Media) Moody's, research on big tech credit quality, July 2026 (as reported) TechCrunch, "How AWS came to be," July 2, 2016 TechCrunch, on the history of Amazon EC2, Aug. 28, 2021 Network World, on the origin myth of AWS, March 2, 2015 Ed Zitron, "The AI Demand Bubble," Where's Your Ed At, Aug. 4, 2026 (opinion) #Amazon #AWS #Anthropic #OpenAI #Business #Explained