Amazon's 'hollow victory'
Amazon.com Inc. has officially dethroned Walmart Inc. as the biggest global company by revenue, a milestone attesting to the massive scale the e-commerce and cloud-computing giant has achieved since its humble beginnings in 1994 as an online bookseller in Jeff Bezosâ Seattle-area garage.
Walmart, which had been the largest company by revenue for more than a decade, on Thursday reported sales of $713.2 billion for the 12 months ending Jan. 31. Amazon, which operates on a fiscal year ending in December, earlier this month reported 2025 sales of $717 billion.
I get the sense that if you were to stop 50 people in the street almost all of them would have assumed that Amazon had passed this milestone long ago. Especially since, as Spencer's article notes, Amazon has for a long time done so much more:
But the revenue story is more about Amazonâs dominance in cloud computing, a business Walmart doesnât compete in. Without AWS, Amazonâs 2025 revenue would have been $588 billion. So its ascendance rests largely on the importance of data centers as critical infrastructure in the age of artificial intelligence.
âThis is a hollow victory,â said Kirthi Kalyanam, executive director of the Retail Management Institute at Santa Clara University. âAmazon didnât beat Walmart in the retail game. It just beat them in revenue by launching a new business Walmart doesnât operate in.â
So in some ways the story is less about how big Amazon is, and more about how Walmart is still such a juggernaut.