AWS Q2 revenue jumps 37% to $42.2B on AI demand; Claude Opus 5 lands on Bedrock

AWS's quarter is the clearest signal yet that enterprise AI spend is translating into cloud revenue at scale. Reported revenue of $42.23 billion (up 37% YoY) marks the segment's fastest growth since 2021, and Amazon says its AI-specific run rate now tops $25 billion and is still growing at triple-digit rates. Jassy, on the earnings call, emphasized customer preference for AWS's breadth, the proximity of AI inference to applications and data, and its security posture, arguing that both AI and traditional workloads are lifting the business.

The growth is being productized aggressively: Bedrock now hosts models from OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek, Meta and others, and this week added Anthropic's newly launched Claude Opus 5. AWS also disclosed a $410 million multi-year infrastructure commitment from Recursive to scale its self-improving AI research system. VP Swami Sivasubramanian announced an expanded internal role shaping AWS AI strategy, underscoring how central the AI narrative has become to the org chart.

Competitively, AWS's print sits alongside Microsoft's blowout (Azure crossing $100B) and confirms that the hyperscaler AI arms race is now a revenue story, not just a capex one. Skeptics flagged the Recursive deal specifically — pouring $410M of a reported $650M raise into a single compute contract — as either evidence of exponential self-improvement or 'bubble logic,' with October's first Recursive products seen as the test. What to watch: margin trajectory as AI capex compounds, and whether Bedrock's multi-model breadth keeps AWS ahead as Azure leans on its own MAI models.