Amazon revenue passes Walmart after earnings reports

For the first time, Amazon has dethroned Walmart as the company with the largest annual revenue.

Walmart on Thursday reported annual revenue of $713.2 billion for its most recent fiscal year, shy of Amazon’s $716.9 billion in revenue. The milestone was brewing for months, as Amazon leapfrogged Walmart in quarterly sales for the first time about a year ago.

The shuffle, while largely symbolic, underscores the battle the two retailers have waged both to define and keep up with ever-changing consumer preferences. They are kicking off a new chapter of that rivalry as artificial intelligence reshapes how companies operate, make money and drive sales.

Amazon rose to the top of the revenue pile by doing much more than running a sprawling online web store and promising speedy delivery. While its core retail unit is its largest revenue generator, its huge cloud computing, advertising and seller services businesses also fuel its sales. Third-party seller services, which include commissions and fees collected by Amazon fulfillment along with shipping, advertising and customer support, accounted for about 24% of the company’s total sales in 2025, according to its latest annual filing. Amazon Web Services was responsible for roughly 18%.

It wasn’t Walmart’s weakness that led it to lose its top spot, as its revenue has more than doubled in 20 years. The retailer has leaned on its more than 4,600 Walmart stores and roughly 600 Sam’s Club locations in the U.S. to power its digital business, which grew by 27% in the U.S. in the fiscal fourth quarter and has posted double-digit percentage gains for 15 straight quarters.

That expansion came as Walmart riffed off the Amazon playbook and tried to position itself as a tech company as well as a retailer.

There have been multiple signs of its ambitions: Walmart relisted its stock, moving from the New York Stock Exchange to the tech-heavy Nasdaq in early December. Its market value surpassed the $1 trillion mark earlier this month, a valuation achieved almost exclusively by tech companies, including Amazon, after a more than 21% rise in the last year.

And the big-box retailer’s fourth-quarter earnings, which were boosted by digital advertising and its third-party marketplace, illustrated Walmart’s emphasis on chasing higher-margin businesses and thinking beyond brick-and-mortar retail.

In many ways, Walmart’s recent push to grow its third-party marketplace was an answer to the dominance of Amazon’s platform. Even as it tries to catch up with Amazon in some areas, Walmart is trying to gain an edge in a new frontier.

Over the past few years, Amazon and Walmart have used different AI strategies to try to make their businesses more efficient and make their merchandise more appealing to shoppers.

Walmart struck a deal with OpenAI’s ChatGPT in October and Google’s Gemini in January to make its products easier to discover and buy. It also has its own AI-powered shopping assistant, Sparky. The…