From Wall Street’s AWS revenue prediction to Amazon’s $200 billion CapEx spending and the future of its Nova AI model family, here are the five biggest things to know ahead of Amazon’s second-quarter 2026 earnings report Thursday.
Amazon’s second-quarter financial earnings report Thursday will answer key questions about AWS’ sales growth driven by AI, if Amazon plans to stick with its $200 billion CapEx spending goal in 2026 and the future of AWS’ AI model family, Nova.
“We continue to view AWS growth as the key metric driving sentiment as investors wrestle with the returns on the massive infrastructure buildout,” said KeyBanc Capital Markets analyst Justin Patterson in an investor note.
CRN breaks down the five big things AWS partners, investors and customers need to know ahead of Amazon’s earnings results for its second quarter of 2026 on July 30 at 5 p.m.ET.
AWS Q2 2026 Earnings Prediction: $40.5 Billion To $41 Billion In Revenue
Wall Street analysts, including Bank of America and Goldman Sachs, believe AWS revenue growth will increase by 33 percent year over year in the second quarter, predicting AWS generated around $41 billion in total revenue.
Other analysts are projecting AWS to have generated $40.5 billion in the second quarter, representing a 31 percent increase from the $30.8 billion the company reported in the second quarter of 2025.
[Related: The 10 Coolest New AWS Tools, Products And AI Innovation Of 2026]
AWS generated a 28 percent revenue increase year over year during the first quarter of 2026.
The Takeaway: If AWS reports a 31 percent to 33 percent year-over-year sales increase for the second quarter of 2026, it would be the highest sales rate increase in four years.
Amazon Potentially Increasing Or Decreasing $200 Billion CapEx Spending Plan
Amazon’s plan is to spend about $200 billion on CapEx in 2026, mostly around AI infrastructure and data centers to increase its compute capacity.
A $200 billion CapEx spending bill for 2026 would mark an increase of 52 percent compared with the $131 billion in CapEx spending in 2025.
Amazon’s massive spending should translate into more compute capacity, which allows more customers to buy more AWS computing.
In comparison, during Google’s second-quarter 2026 earnings report last week the company raised its 2026 CapEx forecast to $195 billion to $205 billion, up from $180 billion to $190 billion. Google executives said the company remains in a supply-constrained environment.
The Takeaway: It will be interesting to see if Amazon increases or decreases its $200 billion CapEx forecast for 2026, which will show just how much demand there is in the market today—and in the pipeline—for its computing.
AWS Margins Possibly Lowering
Wall Street analysts’ consensus estimate is that AWS’ operating margin will be around 33.8 percent in the second quarter of 2026.
In the first quarter od 2026, AWS’ operating margin was 37.7 percent.
If analysts’ consensus is accurate, a 33.8 percent margin would represent a 390-basis- point decrease quarter over quarter.
The Takeaway: An AWS margin decrease could have occurred due to increased expenses for areas such as chips and energy. If this is the case, ongoing AWS margin pressure could outweigh solid cloud growth results.
Anthropic Momentum In Financial Results
Bank of America estimates that Anthropic-related workloads on AWS alone could have added over $1.5 billion in sequential AWS sales growth during the second quarter of 2026.
This year, red-hot AI startup Anthropic signed a $100 billion agreement with AWS to secure up to 5 GW of capacity for training and deploying Claude.
Anthropic and AWS also deepened their partnership by enabling Claude to run on Amazon Bedrock.
Amazon, for its part, will invest $5 billion in Anthropic with up to an additional $20 billion in the future.
The Takeaway: Listeners should focus during the Amazon earnings call on what executives say about Anthropic momentum and any impact it had on AWS’ bottom line.
AWS Nova Models And Trainium Updates
There are a few key AWS products that should be discussed during Amazon’s second-quarter 2026 earnings call, which include its AI model Nova family and custom Trainium chips.
Less than two years after Amazon unveiled its Nova family of AI models, Reuters reported this week that the company is winding down its flagship AI models with the goal of focusing on a new frontier-model effort.
In addition, Amazon’s chips division—including Graviton, Trainium and Nitro—surpassed a $20 billion annualized run rate in the first quarter of 2026, growing at triple-digit percentages year over year.
Trainium3 chips started shipping this year, while its upcoming Trainium4 chip already has a large portion of its capacity reserved by customers.
The Takeaway: AWS should provide an update to its AI model strategy with Nova during the call, as well as give financial updates to its chip—particularly Trainium—momentum.
