Amazon Tops Fortune Global 500: Revenue, AI Capex

For the first time in its history, Amazon sits at the top of the world’s most-watched corporate ranking. On July 28, 2026, Fortune published its 2026 Fortune Global 500, and Amazon claimed the No. 1 spot by revenue, ending a run at the top that Walmart had held for more than a decade. The milestone caps a year in which Amazon’s revenue crossed the $700 billion line — and it lands as the company prepares to spend a sum on artificial intelligence infrastructure that would have been unthinkable a few years ago.

The numbers behind the ranking

Amazon’s revenue rose roughly 12% in 2025 to about $715 billion, narrowly surpassing Walmart, which itself posted a record of about $713 billion and slipped to No. 2. The two are effectively neck-and-neck in absolute dollars; what carried Amazon past its longtime rival was the direction of travel. Walmart grew in the low single digits off a mature retail base, while Amazon compounded double-digit growth across e-commerce, advertising, and — above all — cloud computing.

Fortune noted that Amazon is only the sixth company in the Global 500’s history to hold the top position, joining a short list that includes Walmart, Shell, Exxon Mobil, General Motors, and Mitsubishi. That lineage is telling: the No. 1 slot has historically belonged to retailers, oil majors, and industrial conglomerates. Amazon is the first company to reach it on the back of a business — cloud and digital services — that barely existed when several of those predecessors held the crown.

The rest of the top of the 2026 list reflects the same tension between old and new economic power. Behind Amazon and Walmart sat State Grid of China and UnitedHealth Group, with Saudi Aramco rounding out the leaders — a mix of energy, healthcare, and state-backed utilities that still dwarf most of the technology sector by raw revenue.

The profit crown changes hands, too

Revenue determines the ranking, but the list’s other headline was about profit. For four consecutive years, Saudi Aramco had been the most profitable company on the Global 500, a reflection of the extraordinary margins on crude oil. This year, Alphabet — Google’s parent — ended Aramco’s four-year profit reign, taking the title of the list’s most profitable enterprise.

That handoff is arguably more significant than the revenue shuffle at the very top. It marks the point at which the profit pool of the digital-advertising and cloud economy overtook that of the world’s most efficient oil producer. Alphabet’s ascent to the profit crown was powered by the same forces reshaping the whole sector: search and advertising throwing off enormous cash, and a cloud business that has turned rising AI-driven capital spending into a durable growth engine rather than a drag on earnings.

Amazon’s $200 billion AI bet

If the ranking is the retrospective, the forward-looking story is Amazon’s capital spending. The company devoted about $131 billion to capital expenditures in 2025, and it has signaled that 2026 spending will reach roughly $200 billion — the large majority of it directed at Amazon Web Services and generative AI. Within that figure, AWS is doing the heavy lifting: the unit’s capital spending jumped about 81% to roughly $96.5 billion, accounting for nearly three-quarters of Amazon’s total capex.

That is not incidental to the Global 500 milestone; it is the engine of it. AWS remains Amazon’s profit center and its fastest structural grower, and the AI buildout is the bet that the cloud business can keep expanding as enterprises move training and inference workloads onto rented infrastructure. Chief executive Andy Jassy, who built AWS before taking the top job, has staked Amazon’s next chapter on being the company that supplies the picks and shovels of the AI era — the data centers, chips, and power that everyone else rents rather than builds.

Part of a $700 billion arms race

Amazon’s spending does not exist in isolation. Across the largest hyperscalers, combined AI-related capital expenditure is on track to exceed $700 billion in 2026, a figure that has roughly doubled in two years. Microsoft, Alphabet, and Meta are all lifting their own budgets into the hundreds of billions, and the collective bet is that demand for AI compute will keep pace with — or outrun — the concrete, silicon, and electricity being poured into the ground.

Financing that buildout has increasingly meant reaching beyond operating cash flow. Amazon returned to the bond market earlier this month for one of the year’s largest debt sales, and rivals are turning to off-balance-sheet joint ventures and private credit to spread the cost and the risk. The capex boom now defining hyperscaler spending is the single biggest variable in Big Tech’s earnings story, and the Global 500 ranking is, in a sense, a snapshot of who is winning the race to build.

Bezos, Jassy, and a garage-to-No.1 arc

The symbolic weight of the ranking was not lost on Amazon. Founder Jeff Bezos, who started the company as an online bookseller out of a garage in the early 1990s, framed the No. 1 finish as the culmination of three decades of reinvestment — from books to everything, from retail to cloud, and now from cloud to AI. Jassy inherited that playbook and has applied it to the current moment: spend aggressively while the opportunity is open, accept thin near-term margins, and trust that scale converts into durable advantage.

Whether that trust is warranted is the question hanging over the entire sector. Amazon reached the top of the Global 500 by out-investing and out-growing a retailer. Staying there will depend on whether the AI compute it is building finds paying demand fast enough to justify a $200 billion annual outlay.

What it means

Amazon topping the Fortune Global 500 is more than a trophy. It is a marker of where economic gravity has shifted — from the retailers and oil majors that dominated the list for a generation to the cloud-and-AI platforms now setting the pace. Pair that with Alphabet dethroning Saudi Aramco as the most profitable company on the list, and the 2026 rankings read as a formal changing of the guard.

Who wins. The infrastructure suppliers. Amazon’s rise is a proxy for AWS, and AWS’s rise is a proxy for the belief that AI runs on rented compute. If that thesis holds, the hyperscalers with the deepest capex budgets — Amazon chief among them — capture the recurring revenue of the AI era the way earlier giants captured oil and shelf space.

The risk. Concentration and timing. A $200 billion capital program only pays off if demand materializes on schedule. The same data-center economics that make the buildout attractive turn punishing if utilization lags, and the market has grown visibly less patient with capex that outruns visible returns.

What to watch. Three things. First, AWS growth and margins in the coming quarters — the number that has to justify the spend. Second, how much of the 2026 capex Amazon finances with debt or off-balance-sheet structures versus cash. And third, whether next year’s Global 500 confirms this as a lasting shift or a single-year crossing, with Amazon and Walmart trading places again as their fiscal calendars and growth rates realign.