Amazon Ads announced a US pilot that lets select advertisers run ads in ChatGPT, with Delta Vacations among the first to test it. Advertisers buy the placements through Amazon while OpenAI's ad system decides where they appear. OpenAI said in August 2026 that its ad business had reached a 1 billion dollar annual run rate.
On August 31, 2026 the Federal Trade Commission and 22 state attorneys general sued Amazon in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington. The complaint alleges that since 2019 Amazon used a hidden "soft reserve price," internally called "proxy 2nd price," that turned its nominally second-price ad auctions into first-price ones, so advertisers paid their full bid about 80% of the time by 2024. The FTC says over 1 million brands and sellers were affected, more than 500,000 of them small and medium businesses, across Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands and Display ads.
Amazon confirmed on August 26 that AWS Mechanical Turk closes permanently on September 30, 2026, 21 years after launch; it stopped taking new customers in July. The platform paid humans a few cents per micro-task for work computers could not do, with more than 500,000 workers across 190 countries at its documented peak. A 2023 academic study found up to 46 percent of surveyed workers may have used AI tools to complete their tasks.
Amazon raised prices across its own hardware line overnight, first reported on August 21, 2026. The Echo Dot went from $49.99 to $79.99, a 60 percent increase, the 16GB Kindle from $109.99 to $149.99, and the Fire TV Stick 4K Max from $59.99 to $84.99. Amazon cited significant increases in memory and storage component costs. In late July, CEO Andy Jassy raised the company's 2026 capital spending guidance from $200 billion to $220 billion, naming higher memory prices as a driver.
404 Media hid a tracking device inside a rare book and followed it to an Amazon warehouse in Las Vegas. Employees told the outlet the unit receives massive shipments of printed books, cuts the bindings off so the pages can be scanned faster, and destroys the physical copies in the process. The team is called VGT3 and its logo is a dinosaur holding a book. The investigation was published on August 17, 2026. Amazon told 404 Media it "purchases books through commercial channels" to improve its products and services.
Amazon acquired the GW Ranch site in Pecos County, Texas, and will buy power directly from a natural gas plant being built on the same land by Pacifico Energy: 35 turbines with 7.65 gigawatts of nameplate capacity and about 5 gigawatts of nominal output, running outside the Texas grid at first and designed to move to grid-connected service as interconnection schedules allow. The site's air permit authorizes up to 33 million tons of CO2 a year. For scale, the coal-fired James H. Miller Jr. plant in Alabama, the top US greenhouse gas emitter for nine straight years, released almost 16.6 million tons in 2023; at its permitted ceiling the Texas site would roughly double that and become the largest single emissions source in the country. Amazon co-founded the Climate Pledge and has committed to net zero by 2040.
On July 7, 2026, Amazon launched a US bond sale of at least $25 billion across eight tranches with maturities from 3 to 40 years. Investor demand peaked at $62 billion, and Fortune reports the book closed at about 2.5 times the bonds offered, the weakest demand for a hyperscaler sale since Meta's $30 billion deal in October 2025. Amazon added 18 to 21 basis points of extra yield on its longest bonds. The proceeds fund data centers, chips and power.
As first reported by the Financial Times on July 30, 2026, an internal Amazon project that used Claude to match author records to product listings ran 860% over budget, burned about $1.8 million over five months before anyone noticed, and never launched. Other internal tools went $541,000 and $134,000 over budget, and Amazon scrapped an internal AI-usage leaderboard after employees gamed it by inflating token consumption.
On July 21, 2026 Iran's Revolutionary Guard announced its Aerospace Force launched cruise missiles at Amazon's central data infrastructure in Bahrain and destroyed it, framing the strike as part of Operation Nasr 2 and retaliation for a US strike on a facility in Darkhovin a day earlier. The named target region, AWS ME-South-1, live since 2019, was Amazon's first cloud region in the Middle East. Amazon, the US and Bahrain have not confirmed anything, and no independent evidence of destruction has surfaced: this remains a claim, not a fact.