Amazon revenue passes Walmart after earnings reports
Signs for Walmart (L) and Amazon.
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For the first time, Amazon dethroned Walmart It is the company with the largest annual revenue.
Walmart reported Thursday that its annual revenue was $713.2 billion in its most recent fiscal year; This fell short of Amazon’s $716.9 billion in revenue. This milestone had been months in the making, as Amazon surpassed Walmart in quarterly sales for the first time nearly a year ago.
While this change is largely symbolic, it underscores the two retailers’ struggle to define and keep up with ever-changing consumer preferences. As artificial intelligence reshapes the way companies operate, make money and increase sales, they are turning a new page in this competition.
Amazon has risen to the top of the revenue heap by doing much more than running a sprawling online web store and promising fast delivery. While its main retail unit is the biggest source of revenue, its massive cloud computing, advertising and merchant services businesses are also driving sales. Third-party seller services, which include commissions and fees collected by Amazon fulfillment as well as shipping, advertising and customer support, accounted for about 24% of the company’s total sales in 2025, according to the most recent annual filings. Amazon Web Services was responsible for about 18%.
It wasn’t Walmart’s weakness that caused it to lose its top spot, as its revenue more than doubled in 20 years. The retailer relied on more than 4,600 Walmart stores and nearly 600 Sam’s Club locations in the U.S. to power its digital business, which grew 27% in the U.S. in the fiscal fourth quarter and posted double-digit percentage gains for 15 consecutive quarters.
This expansion comes as Walmart pushes aside Amazon’s tactics and tries to position itself as a technology company as well as a retailer.
There are many signs of their ambition: Walmart relisted its shares and moved from the New York Stock Exchange to the tech-heavy Nasdaq in early December. Its market cap surpassed $1 trillion earlier this month; that valuation was achieved almost exclusively by tech companies, including Amazon, following a more than 21% increase last year.
The big retailer’s fourth-quarter earnings, boosted by digital advertising and its third-party marketplace, show Walmart’s emphasis on pursuing high-margin businesses and thinking beyond brick-and-mortar retail.
Amazon and Walmart’s artificial intelligence goals
Walmart’s latest move to expand its third-party market was in many ways a response to the dominance of Amazon’s platform. Although Walmart is trying to catch up with Amazon in some areas, it is trying to gain an upper hand in a new area.
Over the past few years, Amazon and Walmart have used different AI strategies to make their businesses more efficient and their products more attractive to shoppers.
Like many other companies, Walmart is in the early days of adopting AI, and it’s unclear how the technology will impact its business long-term.
Customers spend more when they use Sparky, Walmart CEO John Furner said on the company’s earnings call Thursday. Customers who use Sparky have an average order value about 35% higher than customers who don’t use the tool, he said.
About half of Walmart’s app users use Sparky, Walmart’s U.S. CEO David Guggina said on the earnings call.
“Agent AI is increasingly settling into Walmart,” Guggina said. “It strengthens our operations. It increases employee productivity and improves the customer experience.”
Walmart Chief Financial Officer John David Rainey said AI investments are included in the retailer’s capital spending plans for the full year and are expected to be roughly 3.5% of sales. These expenses also include the company’s investments in automation and store renovations.
Walmart’s technology ambitions have limits. When it comes to artificial intelligence, Rainey said Walmart will rely on the expertise of technology companies rather than trying to create its own products.
“As you’ve seen from the announcements we’ve made, we’re approaching AI development through partnerships,” he said on the company’s earnings call. “This allows technology companies to do what they do best, develop innovative technology, and gives us the clarity to do what we do best, translate the best technology into retail experiences that create value for our customers, members and our organization.”
Like Walmart, Amazon faces new pressures to respond to the rise of agency commerce. Chatbot creators like OpenAI, Google and Perplexity introduced automated trading features that aim to change the way people shop online.
Other companies like Walmart Etsy And Shopify Amazon, which announced shopping partnerships with artificial intelligence platforms, remained on the sidelines. It blocked reps from accessing its site and doubled down on its own shopping chatbot, Rufus, powered by its own models and Anthropic’s chatbot, Claude.
company in question Rufus has been used by more than 300 million customers and generated almost $12 billion in annualized sales last year. After slowly rolling out the service in beta two years ago, Amazon has injected Rufus into more areas of its app and website to encourage shoppers to use the tool.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy he said last month Rufus and other AI tools can help shoppers find products in a similar way to employees in a physical store, he said.
“I think agencies will help clients with this type of discovery,” Jassy said. “And that’s part of why we’re investing so much in Rufus, our shopping assistant.”
Meanwhile, Amazon is throwing piles of money at AI infrastructure. Earlier this month, it announced it would spend up to $200 billion on AI initiatives this year; That’s more than any other hyperscaler, which projects nearly $700 billion in 2026 spending. Most of Amazon’s spending is expected to go to data centers, chips and networking equipment.
Wall Street has been skeptical of Amazon’s capital spending plans, with the company’s shares falling for nine days following its Feb. 5 earnings report, shedding more than $450 billion in market value.
Amazon’s investments are not limited to artificial intelligence calculations. The company has also put significant resources and capabilities behind developing AI tools across all its businesses. At the same time It launched a number of AI models and revamped its Alexa assistant. It has also invested $8 billion in Anthropic since 2023.
— CNBC’s Robert Hum contributed to this report
