No. 1 on the Fortune Global 500: Amazon's Jeff Bezos on how his garage startup became the largest company in the world by revenue - Fortune

What the report says

Fortune reported that Amazon has taken the No. 1 position on the Fortune Global 500, making it the world’s largest company by revenue and ending Walmart’s long run at the top. In an interview tied to the ranking, founder and executive chair Jeff Bezos reflected on Amazon’s path from a 1995 online bookstore in Bellevue, Washington, to a business spanning retail, cloud computing, logistics, advertising, media and other services. Bezos stepped down as CEO in 2021, when Andy Jassy, previously head of Amazon Web Services, took over.

The article emphasizes that Amazon’s next phase is centered on artificial intelligence infrastructure. Fortune said Amazon spent $131 billion on capital expenditures in 2025 and expects about $200 billion in 2026, largely for AWS and generative AI. The company has struck a multibillion-dollar arrangement with Meta involving Amazon’s Graviton chips and has agreed to invest up to $25 billion in Anthropic, which Fortune said is expected to buy more than $100 billion in Amazon cloud services.

Fortune also traced how earlier bets became major engines of the company, including Marketplace, Prime and AWS. It reported AWS had 2025 operating income of $45.6 billion on $128.7 billion in revenue, up 20% from the prior year. The story noted Amazon’s early difficulty attracting investors, its 1997 IPO, skepticism during the dot-com era, and its eventual profitability in the early 2000s.

The ranking matters because it signals both Amazon’s scale and the stakes of its AI push. Fortune noted that Amazon remains under pressure from retail rivals such as Walmart and faces intense competition in AI, where some observers question whether its next decade can match the pace of its last one.