Amazon Overtakes Walmart and Doubles Down on Cloud: Pinterest Pact and AI Toolkit Signal AWS’s Next Phase

Amazon has achieved a landmark it spent three decades chasing: displacing Walmart at the top of the Fortune 500. The e-commerce and cloud giant booked $717 billion in revenue for 2025, enough to claim the No. 1 spot on the annual ranking of America’s largest corporations for the first time. Yet the stock’s reaction was muted. Shares closed at €217.15 on Friday, down 0.73% on the day and roughly 8.8% below the 52-week high of €238.05.

The real engine behind that historic revenue figure is Amazon Web Services. AWS contributed $129 billion to the top line, and its 20% growth rate in 2025 was already double that of the North American retail business. That pace accelerated further in the first quarter of 2026, with AWS jumping 28% year over year — the strongest momentum the cloud unit has seen in 15 quarters. The contrast with retail, which grew just 12%, underscores how dependent Amazon’s ascent has become on high-margin cloud computing.

Two strategic moves announced within 48 hours underscore that dependence. Social media platform Pinterest committed to spending $4 billion on AWS cloud services through 2031, the largest infrastructure investment in Pinterest’s history. The deal pivots on artificial intelligence: Pinterest will train and run its models on Amazon’s Trainium and Graviton chips, aiming to sharpen visual search and personalize shopping recommendations for more than 600 million monthly active users. The entire computing platform is migrating to Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service. Analysts view the pact as evidence that Amazon’s homegrown chip architecture can seriously challenge Nvidia. Pinterest shares rose 5% to 6% on the news; Amazon gained roughly 1.7%, lifting its stock to around €218.75 at one point.

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The following day, AWS released the “Agentic Shopping Assistant” toolkit, a technology built on Alexa for Shopping that lets third-party merchants build their own AI-powered shopping advisors. The system handles natural-language customer queries and complex purchase guidance. Luxury fashion group Tapestry, parent of Kate Spade and other brands, is the first high-profile adopter. Amazon says the underlying system has already served roughly 300 million customers and generated an additional $12 billion in revenue. The toolkit puts AWS in direct competition with similar AI offerings from Google Cloud.

Behind the scenes, Amazon is balancing aggressive expansion with cost discipline. A €10 billion-plus modernization program for European logistics hubs, including new robotics, will create 25,000 jobs. But the company also cut approximately 30,000 positions between October and January as CEO Andy Jassy pushes to reduce bureaucracy and free up capital for massive AI investments. The 2026 capital expenditure plan stands at an eye-popping $200 billion, weighted heavily toward AI infrastructure and logistics. In Europe, the next-generation Proteus warehouse robot is scheduled for wide deployment in the first half of 2027.

For now, the stock price remains disconnected from the operational strength. The shares have fallen about 7% over the past 30 days, even though they trade nearly 10% above the 200-day moving average. The next major test comes in June with the annual Prime Day event, widely seen as an early gauge of consumer sentiment and the health of Amazon’s core e-commerce business. Whether investors start pricing in the cloud momentum more aggressively may depend on that reading and the next quarterly results.