Indicators for Walmart (L) and Amazon.
Getty Photographs
For the primary time, Amazon has dethroned Walmart as the corporate with the most important annual income.
Walmart on Thursday reported annual income of $713.2 billion for its most up-to-date fiscal yr, shy of Amazon’s $716.9 billion in income. The milestone was brewing for months, as Amazon leapfrogged Walmart in quarterly gross sales for the primary time a few yr in the past.
The shuffle, whereas largely symbolic, underscores the battle the 2 retailers have waged each to outline and sustain with ever-changing shopper preferences. They’re kicking off a brand new chapter of that rivalry as synthetic intelligence reshapes how firms function, generate profits and drive gross sales.
Amazon rose to the highest of the income pile by doing far more than operating a sprawling on-line webstore and promising speedy supply. Whereas its core retail unit is its largest income generator, its enormous cloud computing, promoting and vendor providers companies additionally gasoline its gross sales. Third-party vendor providers, which embrace commissions and costs collected by Amazon achievement together with transport, promoting and buyer assist, accounted for about 24% of the corporate’s complete gross sales in 2025, in line with its newest annual submitting. Amazon Internet Companies was liable for roughly 18%.
It wasn’t Walmart’s weak point that led it to lose its prime spot, as its income has greater than doubled in 20 years. The retailer has leaned on its greater than 4,600 Walmart shops and roughly 600 Sam’s Membership areas within the U.S. to energy its digital enterprise, which grew by 27% within the U.S. within the fiscal fourth quarter and has posted double-digit share beneficial properties for 15 straight quarters.
That growth got here as Walmart riffed off the Amazon playbook and tried to place itself as a tech firm in addition to a retailer.
There have been a number of indicators of its ambitions: Walmart relisted its inventory, transferring from the New York Inventory Change to the tech-heavy Nasdaq in early December. Its market worth surpassed the $1 trillion mark earlier this month, a valuation achieved virtually solely by tech firms together with Amazon, after a greater than 21% rise within the final yr.
And the big-box retailer’s fourth-quarter earnings, which have been boosted by digital promoting and its third-party market, illustrated Walmart’s emphasis on chasing higher-margin companies and pondering past brick-and-mortar retail.
Amazon and Walmart’s AI ambitions
In some ways, Walmart’s latest push to develop its third-party market was a solution to the dominance of Amazon’s platform. Even because it tries to meet up with Amazon in some areas, Walmart is making an attempt to achieve an edge in a brand new frontier.
Over the previous few years, Amazon and Walmart have used totally different AI methods to attempt to make their companies extra environment friendly and make their merchandise extra interesting to consumers.
Walmart struck a deal with OpenAI’s ChatGPT in October and Google’s Gemini in January to make its merchandise simpler to find and purchase. It additionally has its personal AI-powered procuring assistant, Sparky. The digital assistant, which appears to be like like a smiley face, pops up on Walmart’s app and can assist consumers discover gadgets.
Walmart, like many different firms, is within the early days of AI adoption, and it is unclear how the expertise will have an effect on its enterprise long-term.
On the corporate’s earnings name on Thursday, Walmart CEO John Furner stated clients are spending extra after they use Sparky. He stated clients who use Sparky have a median order worth that is about 35% larger than consumers who do not use the software.
About half of Walmart’s app customers have used Sparky, Walmart U.S. CEO David Guggina stated on the earnings name.
“Agentic AI is more and more embedded throughout Walmart,” Guggina stated. “It is strengthening our operations. It is enhancing affiliate productiveness, and it is enhancing the shopper expertise.”
Walmart CFO John David Rainey stated AI investments are included within the retailer’s capital expenditure plans for the total yr, that are anticipated to be roughly 3.5% of gross sales. These bills additionally embrace the corporate’s investments in automation and retailer remodels.
There are limits to Walmart’s tech ambitions. Relating to AI, Rainey stated Walmart will lean on the experience of tech firms moderately than attempt to create its personal merchandise.
“As you’ve got seen from the bulletins we have made, we’re approaching AI improvement via partnerships,” he stated on the corporate’s earnings name. “This lets tech firms do what they do greatest, develop modern expertise, and it supplies us readability to do what we do greatest, to translate the perfect of tech to retail experiences that create worth for our clients and members and our enterprise.”
Like Walmart, Amazon can be going through new stress to reply to the rise of agentic commerce. Chatbot makers like OpenAI, Google and Perplexity have launched automated commerce options that purpose to vary how individuals store on-line.
Whereas different firms like Walmart, Etsy and Shopify have introduced procuring partnerships with AI platforms, Amazon has remained on the sidelines. It is blocked brokers from accessing its web site, and doubled down by itself procuring chatbot, Rufus, which is powered by its personal fashions and Anthropic’s chatbot Claude.
The corporate stated Rufus has been utilized by greater than 300 million clients and drove virtually $12 billion in incremental annualized gross sales final yr. After slowly rolling out the service in beta two years in the past, Amazon has injected Rufus throughout extra areas of its app and web site to encourage consumers to make use of the software.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy stated final month that Rufus and different AI instruments might help consumers with discovering merchandise very similar to an worker in a bodily retailer.
“I feel brokers are going to assist clients with that sort of discovery,” Jassy stated. “And it is a part of why we have invested a lot in Rufus, which is our procuring assistant.”
In the meantime, Amazon is throwing piles of money at AI infrastructure. Earlier this month, it introduced it will spend as much as $200 billion this yr on AI initiatives, greater than any of the opposite hyperscalers, which have altogether forecast almost $700 billion in 2026 expenditures. Most of Amazon’s spending is anticipated to go to information facilities, chips and networking gear.
Wall Avenue has seen Amazon’s capex plans skeptically, sending the corporate’s shares down for 9 days straight following its Feb. 5 earnings report and shaving greater than $450 billion off of its market worth.
Amazon’s investments aren’t restricted to AI compute. The corporate has additionally put important sources and expertise behind growing AI instruments throughout all of its companies. It is also rolled out a collection of AI fashions, and revamped its Alexa assistant. It additionally has invested $8 billion in Anthropic since 2023.
— CNBC’s Robert Hum contributed to this report
