Amazon's trailing twelve-month free cash flow has turned negative as AI infrastructure spending accelerates. The company raised its 2026 capex guidance to roughly $220 billion, up from $200 billion, even as AWS revenue keeps growing sharply.
Amazon's trailing twelve-month free cash flow sits at negative $7.6 billion, driven largely by AI infrastructure buildouts.
AWS growth meets a widening cash gap
Amazon's Q2 2026 report, released July 30, showed AWS revenue climbing 37% to $42.2 billion. Despite AWS generating $16.6 billion in segment operating income, the company's free cash flow has moved into negative territory.
Amazon has also raised its full-year 2026 capex guidance to approximately $220 billion, up from an earlier estimate of $200 billion. Rising costs of memory chips drove the revision.
Why Amazon says the spending is rational
Amazon points to a substantial AWS backlog filled with multi-year customer commitments from heavyweights like Anthropic and OpenAI. Amazon's management has emphasized contracted backlogs and committed customer relationships, including clients like Anthropic and OpenAI, both of which are scaling their own compute needs rapidly.
But AWS still leads in overall cloud market share, yet a 37% revenue growth rate needs to stay strong long enough to justify a quarter-trillion dollars in annual capital expenditure, with Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud both competing for the same workloads.
The test ahead
Source: Crypto Briefing
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