Amazon received roughly $600M in tariff refunds last quarter, according to CFO Brian Olsavsky on an earnings call last week. However, you likely won't be getting much of that sweet tariff money back.
The disclosure came after months of Amazon refusing to say whether it would even apply for refunds. Consumers sued in Seattle federal court in May, alleging Amazon was sitting out the refund process to curry favor with Trump, who told CNBC in April that he'd “remember” companies that didn't seek refunds.
Olsavsky said:
“We are participating in the tariff refund process, and as I mentioned earlier, we received approximately $600 million in Q2. The amount is limited for a couple reasons. First, our teams did a lot of work forward-buying and pre-positioning inventory to avoid tariff costs. Second, we are not the importer of record for the large majority of items sold in our store given suppliers typically handle imports and pay relevant tariffs. In cases where we did see an increase in costs due to tariffs, we largely absorbed those costs rather than pass them on to customers.”
I'd like to be shown that, not told. Particularly the part about Amazon absorbing the cost of tariffs. Because earlier this year, CEO Andy Jassy said the opposite:
“At a certain point, because retail is, as you know, a mid-single-digit operating margin business, if people’s costs go up by 10%, there aren’t a lot of places to absorb it. You don’t have endless options.”
Also, DataWeave found Amazon prices up 5.7% through the end of September 2025, against 1.7% at Target, across roughly 16,000 items per retailer, though to be fair, that includes across third-party sellers. Last but not least, the $600M figure is suspiciously small for a company Amazon's size. In comparison, Apple reported $2.2B in tariff refunds for the same quarter with roughly another $1B expected, and Amazon is the larger importer.
Olsavsky said that some customers can expect refunds, but it'll be limited:
“We have identified a limited set of circumstances where we can trace that we passed specific import charges on to customers, and when we receive those refunds, we will proactively contact affected customers and automatically issue refunds to them. Otherwise, like other large retailers, we’ll utilize refunds to continue to invest in low prices for customers.”
Nice story, but I'm going to guess that that $600M goes straight into AI data center buildout. Prove me wrong.
