For the first time in its three decades-plus history, Amazon is now No. 1 on the Fortune 500 list.

The Seattle-based tech giant knocked Walmart down to No. 2, ending the Arkansas-based retailer’s 13-year reign on top. The list ranks 500 of the largest American corporations by revenue each year and only four companies have ever held the top spot since Fortune began publishing it in 1955: Amazon, Exxon Mobil, General Motors and Walmart.

Though Amazon and Walmart are retail competitors, vying for hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue each year, Amazon also has its cloud-computing division, Amazon Web Services, that brings in billions in sales as well.

Amazon reported $717 billion in revenue for 2025, with AWS sales accounting for $129 billion of that. Walmart’s 2025 revenue came in near $713 billion.

Despite seesaw tariff policies over the past year that have weakened consumer sentiment, retail sales for Amazon and Walmart showed steady growth each quarter.

But Amazon’s cloud revenue is growing faster than the company’s retail revenue. In 2025, AWS showed 20% sales growth year over year, double what the North American retail division reported. That trend is continuing this year, as AWS sales grew 28% in the first quarter year over year, while retail sales in North America grew 12%.

Amazon dethroned Walmart based on last year’s revenue, the same year it kicked off a wave of layoffs. From October through January, Amazon ended the employment of 30,000 workers in a bid to reduce the number of managers throughout the company. While Amazon is pouring billions of dollars into artificial intelligence, the company maintains job-cutting isn’t to offset the capital expenses, but rather part of CEO Andy Jassy’s fight against bureaucracy.

Further down Fortune 500’s list were more examples of the incongruity between tech’s financial health and the waves of layoffs in the industry.

Microsoft, which laid off 15,000 employees last year, reached its highest ranking at No. 11, climbing three spots from last year. The company reported $281.7 billion in revenue in 2025, a 15% increase from 2024.

Meta, which has undergone multiple waves of layoffs last year and this year, climbed five spots from last year to No. 17, its highest ranking ever. The company’s reported $2.16 billion in revenue in 2025 was a 22% year-over-year increase.

Other Seattle-area companies high on the list were Costco at No. 13, one spot down from last year and Boeing at No. 47, which climbed 16 spots.

Costco’s modest revenue growth may be the reason companies, including Microsoft, leapfrogged it on the list. Costco reported $2.75 billion in sales last year, up 8.2% from 2024.

Boeing’s rise up the ranks was due to increased airplane production, after a rough year in 2024. The company’s revenue in 2024 suffered due to a midair fuselage blowout early in the year and a Machinists strike later in the year. The aerospace giant also sold one of its business units, Jeppesen, at the end of 2025, which contributed to its total revenue for the year.

©2026 The Seattle Times. Visit seattletimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.