A business with more than $100 billion of annual sales can have no share price of its own. One such business began in 2006 as a service that rented computing and storage to outside developers, and twenty years on it sells computing, storage and databases to governments, banks and the labs building frontier AI models. In its latest quarter it earned more operating profit than its parent's two store divisions combined. It has a name and its own chief executive, and it does not have a ticker.
A business the size of Amazon Web Services looks as if it should trade under its own ticker, the way a spun-off subsidiary would, and a search for its stock ends at a share that carries two other businesses with it.
Public companies are allowed to run several businesses under one listing. Each is reported as a segment, with its own sales and operating income, while the shares exist only at the top. A shareholder therefore owns a slice of every segment at once and cannot buy one without the rest.
For Amazon's cloud business the routes to that slice are a share through a broker or, from a crypto account, a tokenized share, the AMZNX/USDT Spot pair, and a perpetual contract, the AMZNUSDT Perpetual. How much of the whole is AWS, why it earns what it earns, and what could go wrong with it decide whether the slice is worth having.
Can you buy AWS stock?
AWS stock does not exist, because Amazon Web Services is a reporting segment of Amazon.com, Inc., which has one class of listed share, AMZN. In the quarter to June 30, 2026, AWS earned $42.2 billion of net sales and $16.6 billion of operating income, 21% of Amazon's sales and 61% of its operating income (source: Amazon Q2 2026 Form 10-Q).
A segment is an accounting division of a company, not a company of its own. Amazon organizes itself into three of them, North America, International and AWS (source: Amazon Form 10-K). The cloud business, launched in 2006, describes itself as part of Amazon (source: AWS). Every dollar it earns still flows into the same income statement as the dollars earned by selling paperbacks, and the company's only registered security is that one class of common stock. There is no AWS ticker on Nasdaq, no AWS certificate at a tokenization issuer and no AWS contract on any exchange, because there is nothing separate to issue them against. Its results appear in a segment note in each quarterly report, in the same table as the two store segments (source: Amazon Q2 2026 Form 10-Q).
Say you want AWS and only AWS. The nearest you can get is a share of Amazon. On the June quarter's numbers, about $61 of every $100 of operating profit behind that share came from the cloud, and the other $39 from the two store segments. Owning Amazon stock (AMZN) means owning that whole mix in one instrument, which is the trade you make when you buy the cloud business through its parent. From a crypto account the same instrument is the AMZNX/USDT Spot pair on BloFin, priced live against USDT.
How much of Amazon is AWS?
AWS is roughly a fifth of Amazon's sales and well over half of its operating income, and that gap has held for three years. In 2025 the segment produced $128.7 billion of $716.9 billion in net sales and $45.6 billion of $80.0 billion in operating income, 18% of one and 57% of the other, up from 16% of sales and 67% of operating income ($24.6 billion) in 2023 and 17% and 58% in 2024 (source: Amazon Form 10-K).
Period | AWS net sales | Share of Amazon sales | AWS operating income | Share of Amazon operating income |
|---|---|---|---|---|
2023 | $90.8 billion | 16% | $24.6 billion | 67% |
2024 | $107.6 billion | 17% | $39.8 billion | 58% |
2025 | $128.7 billion | 18% | $45.6 billion | 57% |
Q2 2026 | $42.2 billion | 21% | $16.6 billion | 61% |
By sales, AWS is level with International at $42.2 billion in the June quarter and far behind North America's $116.2 billion. By operating income it is larger than the other two combined, at $16.6 billion against $9.1 billion from North America and $1.7 billion from International (source: Amazon Q2 2026 Form 10-Q). AWS sales grew 37% in the June quarter, the fastest in 18 quarters, and the release put the segment on a $169 billion annualized revenue run rate (source: Amazon Q2 2026 earnings release).
Say you hold $1,000 of Amazon. On the June quarter's split, about $210 of that position's sales exposure is AWS, and about $610 of its operating-profit exposure is. A change in AWS's growth rate reaches your position through profit far more than through sales. That is why the segment's growth figure sits in the headline of Amazon's own release and at the top of Amazon's earnings reports. Microsoft's cloud sits at a different share of a different company, which is why Amazon versus Microsoft stock turns on the same arithmetic with different inputs.
Why AWS earns so much more than the stores
AWS earns more per dollar of sales than the stores because it sells capacity that is already built, priced by usage and under contract, and much of its cost, hardware depreciation, arrives after the revenue. Its operating margin was 35.4% in 2025 and 39.4% in the June 2026 quarter, against 7.9% for North America (source: Amazon Q2 2026 Form 10-Q).
The revenue side is usage. Amazon's filings describe AWS growth as "increased customer usage, partially offset by pricing changes primarily driven by long-term customer contracts" (source: Amazon Q2 2026 Form 10-Q). Customers consume more computing every year, and the biggest of them negotiate lower unit prices for committing to it. A store has to buy, ship and sell an item to earn each dollar; a data center earns its next dollar from a server already racked. The expense side is technology infrastructure, meaning the servers, buildings and power. The filings attribute the growth in AWS's costs to "spending on technology infrastructure that was primarily driven by additional investments to support AWS business growth" (source: Amazon Q2 2026 Form 10-Q).
Depreciation is the cost to watch, because it lags. Amazon allocates its technology infrastructure assets to the segments by usage, with most of them landing in AWS, and charges their depreciation against segment income as the hardware ages. AWS's depreciation and amortization ran $8.1 billion in the June 2026 quarter against $4.8 billion a year earlier. The segment's assets grew from $252.6 billion at the end of 2025 to $350.2 billion by June 30, 2026 (source: Amazon Q2 2026 Form 10-Q). The revenue from a new data center starts the month it opens, while the depreciation is spread over the years that follow. In a build-out this fast, today's margin carries less of the hardware's cost than the coming quarters will. The custom chips inside those data centers are the other cost the margin turns on, which is why Amazon builds its own AI chips at all.
The AWS backlog and the customers inside it
The AWS backlog is about $496 billion of customer commitments, mostly for AWS services, that Amazon has signed but not yet delivered, with a weighted-average remaining life of 6.4 years as of June 30, 2026 (source: Amazon Q2 2026 Form 10-Q). That figure is larger than the segment's sales for 2023, 2024 and 2025 combined.
Two customers account for the largest additions the filings name. In the March 2026 quarter, AWS and OpenAI expanded an existing $38.0 billion commitment by $100.0 billion over eight years (source: Amazon Q2 2026 Form 10-Q). In the June quarter AWS and Anthropic expanded their collaboration by more than $100.0 billion over ten years, and both agreements include obligations tied to the performance of AWS's own chips (source: Amazon Q2 2026 Form 10-Q). The same two labs are companies Amazon has invested in. It held $28.7 billion of OpenAI's Series C preferred stock at June 30, 2026, against a $50 billion total commitment (source: Amazon Q2 2026 Form 10-Q). Its Anthropic preferred stock produced most of the $53.4 billion non-operating gain in the quarter's net income (source: Amazon Q2 2026 earnings release). A share of the backlog is therefore spending by companies whose shares Amazon also owns, and the value it carries for its Anthropic stake and its OpenAI stake moves with those labs' funding rounds (source: Amazon Q2 2026 Form 10-Q).
The AI line inside AWS now reports its own run rate. Amazon said its AWS AI business had passed a $25 billion annual revenue run rate, growing at triple-digit percentages, and that its chips business had passed the same mark (source: Amazon Q2 2026 earnings release). Bedrock, the service through which AWS customers rent access to outside models, added more customers in the six months before the July 30 release than in its first two years. Its customers spent more in the quarter than in all prior quarters combined (source: Amazon Q2 2026 earnings release). Those lines are part of what moves the Amazon stock price. A backlog that size also raises the question of whether the business could stand on its own.
Could AWS be spun off?
Amazon has never separated AWS, and nothing in its 2025 annual report or its June 2026 quarterly report describes a plan to. The filings treat the cloud business as one of three reportable segments that share infrastructure, staff and a balance sheet, and they report no revenue passing between the segments at all (source: Amazon Form 10-K).
A separation would have to unpick that sharing. Amazon's technology infrastructure assets, the data centers and the hardware in them, are allocated among the segments by usage rather than owned segment by segment. The AWS segment's own assets consist mainly of property and equipment, receivables and leases carried on Amazon's consolidated books (source: Amazon Q2 2026 Form 10-Q). The OpenAI and Anthropic stakes sit in the corporate line, outside AWS, even though the commitments those labs have made sit inside the AWS backlog. Drawing a line around the cloud business would mean deciding which of those assets, investments and contracts went with it.
Say you hold Amazon and a spin-off is announced tomorrow. You would receive shares in a new cloud company alongside your existing shares, and the market would price the two parts separately. Until that happens, what you own is the combined business, in which the cloud is the profit engine and the stores are the revenue, and a share price that reflects both. The margin gap between the cloud and the stores has held since 2023, and the filings continue to describe three segments and one share. Meanwhile, the risks the segment carries are Amazon's risks, and they reach a shareholder through the same single share.
The risks inside AWS: Outages and concentration
AWS sells uptime, so its first risk is an outage and its second is how much of its business rests on a few customers. On October 19 and 20, 2025, a disruption in its Northern Virginia region raised DynamoDB error rates from 11:48 PM to 2:40 AM Pacific time (source: AWS post-event summary).
Its network load balancers then returned connection errors from 5:30 AM to 2:09 PM (source: AWS post-event summary). AWS traced the fault to a latent race condition in DynamoDB's automated DNS (Domain Name System) management, the system that maps a service's name to its network addresses, which left the service's regional endpoint with an empty record that the automation failed to repair. From there the failure spread to other services that depend on DynamoDB, including new server launches in the same region, and the event ended at 2:20 PM (source: AWS post-event summary). One record in one system took a region's worth of customers with it.
A single region's failure is one form of concentration; the other is the customer list. The backlog's largest named additions come from two AI labs, and the filings say both agreements include obligations tied to AWS's chips (source: Amazon Q2 2026 Form 10-Q). A change in either lab's plans would therefore reach AWS through its largest contracts and through the chips business at once. A smaller line is energy. Amazon enters into contracts to secure electricity for its operations and marks them to market each quarter. The $551 million unrealized gain on those contracts in the June 2026 quarter landed mainly inside AWS's costs (source: Amazon Q2 2026 Form 10-Q). The segment's margin can therefore move with electricity prices as well as with servers. Those are the risks a holder takes on through any of the routes to the segment.
How to get AWS exposure with crypto
AWS exposure on BloFin comes through Amazon, in two forms: the AMZNX/USDT Spot pair, a tokenized Amazon share, and the AMZNUSDT Perpetual, a contract on Amazon's price at up to 20x leverage (source: BloFin AMZN contract details). Each carries the whole company, and so each carries the cloud business at whatever share of the whole it holds.
The token is a share's price in a crypto account. AMZNX is a tracker certificate that follows the price of an Amazon share, issued by Backed Assets (JE) Limited (source: Backed Assets), and what tokenized Amazon (AMZNX) is comes down to that certificate. BloFin quotes it against USDT, so buying it means buying every segment at once, AWS included, in the same proportion as the share. Placing that order takes a funded USDT balance and a limit or market order, once you have accepted the attestation the spot page shows before trading; how to buy tokenized Amazon on BloFin gives the order screen step by step.
The contract is the same price with margin. AMZNUSDT trades long or short from 1x to 20x, settles funding every eight hours and takes 0.01 AMZN as the smallest order (source: BloFin AMZN contract details). It is priced from an index built on tokenized Amazon (source: BloFin stock futures notice). Nothing is held in custody behind it, and the position can be liquidated.
Say you hold the token and AWS reports a quarter that beats on growth. Amazon published the June quarter on July 30 and held its call at 5:00 pm Eastern (source: Amazon Q2 2026 earnings release), after Nasdaq's regular session ends at 4:00 pm Eastern time (source: Nasdaq). The spot pair trades 24 hours a day on weekdays, so you can act on the AWS number through the token that evening (source: BloFin xStocks risk disclosure). The perpetual may be limited to reduce-only orders outside Nasdaq's regular hours (source: BloFin stock futures notice), so a new leveraged position waits for the 9:30 am Eastern open. Round-the-clock weekday access is what the token adds over a brokerage share, whose after-hours session ends at 8:00 pm Eastern (source: Nasdaq), for every one of the tokenized stocks BloFin lists.
Looking to gain exposure to Amazon? To get started, you'll need to first create a BloFin account, fund your account with cryptocurrency, and navigate to the AMZNX/USDT Spot trading page or AMZNUSDT Perpetual page.
Frequently asked questions
Who runs AWS?
Matt Garman has been chief executive of Amazon Web Services since June 2024, after running its sales, marketing and support organization and before that its compute services (source: Amazon Form 10-K). Andy Jassy, Amazon's president and chief executive since July 2021, led AWS as a senior vice president from April 2006 and as its chief executive from April 2016 until he took over the whole company.
How fast is AWS growing?
AWS sales grew 19% in 2024 and 20% in 2025 (source: Amazon Form 10-K), then 33% in the first half of 2026 (source: Amazon Q2 2026 Form 10-Q). Operating income grew faster still over the same half, by 42%, while North America's sales grew 14% and International's 17%.
How much did AWS earn in the first half of 2026?
AWS produced $79.8 billion of net sales and $30.8 billion of operating income in the six months to June 30, 2026, against $60.1 billion and $21.7 billion in the same half of 2025 (source: Amazon Q2 2026 Form 10-Q). That half-year operating income already exceeds the $24.6 billion the segment earned in the whole of 2023 (source: Amazon Form 10-K), and it came from $49.0 billion of operating expenses against $38.4 billion a year earlier.
How much of Amazon's assets does AWS hold?
AWS held $350.2 billion of Amazon's $1,095.7 billion of total assets at June 30, 2026, against $249.0 billion for North America and $85.3 billion for International (source: Amazon Q2 2026 Form 10-Q). The corporate line, which includes the company's investments, accounted for $411.2 billion of that total, so the cloud segment holds more than the two store segments combined and the segment's depreciation charge is the largest of the three.
What does the AWS segment include?
Amazon defines the AWS segment as "amounts earned from global sales of compute, storage, database, and other services for start-ups, enterprises, government agencies, and academic institutions" (source: Amazon Q2 2026 Form 10-Q). Advertising, Prime subscriptions and the marketplace sit inside the North America and International segments, which Amazon defines by the stores that make the sale, so the AWS figures are the cloud business alone.
Researched and written by the BloFin Academy editorial team with AI-assisted drafting. All facts independently verified. Primary sources include Amazon's Form 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30, 2026, its second quarter 2026 earnings release and 2025 Form 10-K, AWS's post-event summary of the October 2025 outage and its company page, Nasdaq's trading-hours page, the Backed Assets product page for Amazon xStock, and BloFin's AMZN contract details page, stock futures notice and xStocks risk disclosure, current as of September 2026.
Nothing in this article constitutes financial advice, and nothing in it is a recommendation to buy, sell or hold Amazon in any form. Segment results describe past reported periods and are not a guide to future performance; a growth rate cited for a single quarter can reverse, and the backlog is a commitment to spend that customers can slow or restructure. AWS's margin carries depreciation that lags the spending behind it, so the margin reported today does not reflect the full cost of the current build. AMZNX is a tracker certificate rather than a share, carrying no voting or information rights and exposure to the issuer, its custodians and the trading venue in addition to Amazon's own market risk. Leveraged positions in AMZNUSDT carry the risk of liquidation and total loss of margin. Past performance does not indicate future results. Do your own research and consider your risk tolerance before you trade on BloFin.