Amazon and Shopify both beat Q1 revenue estimates, but the real story is the widest capex gap in modern commerce. Amazon poured $44.2 billion into infrastructure in a single quarter, up nearly 77% from a year earlier, while Shopify spent $5 million and generated $476 million in free cash flow. One company is building the AI backbone for half the internet; the other is arming the merchants trying to survive on it.
AWS delivered $37.6 billion in revenue, growing 28%, its fastest pace in fifteen quarters, and Andy Jassy disclosed that the custom chip business, spanning Trainium, Graviton and Nitro, has hit a $20 billion run rate growing triple digits year over year. Advertising, now a $70 billion trailing-twelve-month engine, gives Amazon a second profit lever that most cloud peers lack. The top line rose 16.6% to $181.5 billion, and EPS of $2.78 crushed the $1.65 consensus.
Shopify's top line is smaller at $3.17 billion but growing faster: 34.3% year over year, accelerating from 27% in Q1 2025. Merchant Solutions surged 39% to $2.42 billion, and gross merchandise value crossed $100.7 billion for the first time, up 35%. Operating income nearly doubled to $382 million, though a $941 million mark-to-market equity loss dragged GAAP net income to negative $581 million; underlying profit came in at $360 million.
The capital discipline could not be starker. Amazon's Q1 spend implies a full-year run rate that Polymarket traders price at a 98.5% probability of exceeding $170 billion and an 86.5% chance of topping $200 billion. Anthropic has committed to up to 5 gigawatts of Trainium capacity, OpenAI to roughly 2 gigawatts. That is a utility-scale bill for AWS to justify. Shopify, by contrast, bought back $491 million of stock under a fresh $2 billion authorization and originated $1.35 billion in merchant loans, turning Shop Capital into a meaningful financial services line.
Valuation frames the bet differently. Amazon trades at 31 times earnings; Shopify at 121. The premium buys 34% revenue growth versus 17%, but it also buys a model that does not require building data centers. Amazon's chips and capacity commitments suggest the spend is not discretionary, it is the cost of staying in the AI arms race. Shopify's model assumes the arms race lowers the cost of intelligence for everyone else.
What matters next is whether AWS growth can sustain a trajectory that amortizes $200 billion of annual capex without margin compression, and whether Shopify's GMV acceleration can persist without the platform subsidies that fueled earlier quarters. The merchant lending book is now large enough to matter; the mark-to-market volatility is large enough to obscure earnings. Two visions of commerce infrastructure, one capital-intensive, one capital-light, both betting the other side eventually blinks.