Space Exploration Technologies (SPCX +4.11%) went public on Friday, June 12, and promptly soared to an all-time high of $225.64. But by the market close on Friday, June 26, the stock had fallen by 32% to $153.23.
The space transportation and internet connectivity company, which was founded by Elon Musk, still has a market capitalization of $2 trillion. With just $19.3 billion in trailing 12-month revenue, its stock is trading at a price-to-sales (P/S) ratio of 103, making it 15 times as expensive as the Nasdaq-100 technology index. As a result, I think more downside could be on the way for SpaceX.
If I had $10,000 to invest in one stock for my diversified portfolio, I'd definitely look elsewhere. Here's why Amazon (AMZN +1.72%) might be the better long-term buy.
Image source: The Motley Fool.
Amazon's e-commerce business is increasingly profitable Amazon is a tech conglomerate with a presence in e-commerce, cloud computing, streaming, digital advertising, and more. It's best known for its e-commerce business, which was started in 1994 and now accounts for more than one-third of all online sales in the U.S.
In 2023, Amazon split its American fulfillment network into eight distinct regions to shorten the distance each order travels before reaching its customer. This continues to reduce logistics costs, and it enables Amazon to provide same-day delivery to more customers, which increases their satisfaction.
Amazon is also investing heavily in artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics to make its fulfillment centers more efficient. These innovations, combined with the regionalization efforts, are improving the profitability of the e-commerce business. That business has historically operated on razor-thin margins because Amazon focuses on giving customers the lowest possible prices.
During the first quarter of 2026 (ended March 31), Amazon's North American and International e-commerce segments combined to generate $9.7 billion in operating income, which was up by a whopping 47% compared to the year-ago period. In other words, e-commerce is quickly becoming a tailwind for Amazon's overall earnings, which has positive implications for its stock price (we'll explore this further in a moment).
A leader in artificial intelligence infrastructure Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world's largest cloud computing platform, offering hundreds of solutions to help businesses thrive in the digital age. But Wall Street is squarely focused on its growing portfolio of AI services, which is fueling a new growth phase.
AWS operates data centers fitted with the latest graphics processing units (GPUs) from suppliers like Nvidia, and it rents the computing capacity to other businesses that use it to develop AI software. It also designed its own chips, like Trainium2, which offers 30% better price performance than competing hardware -- though it was recently superseded by Trainium3, which is up to 40% better.
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AWS Bedrock is a platform that lets businesses access the latest, ready-made large language models (LLMs) from top developers like OpenAI and Anthropic to accelerate their AI software development. Bedrock had over 125,000 customers at the end of Q1 2026, and Amazon said that its spending increased by an eye-popping 170% compared to three months earlier in the fourth quarter of 2025.
AWS generated $37.5 billion in total revenue during Q1, representing 28% growth compared to the year-ago period. It was the third straight quarter in which that growth rate accelerated, which highlights the incredible demand for AI services.
Perhaps the best is yet to come. AWS has a $364 billion order backlog from customers who are waiting for more data center infrastructure to come online, not including a recent deal with Anthropic worth $100 billion on its own.
Amazon stock trades at an attractive valuation Amazon stock has a P/S ratio of just 3.3, so not only is it substantially cheaper than SpaceX, but it's also cheaper than the Nasdaq-100, which trades at a P/S ratio of 6.8. However, Amazon stock also looks very attractive when valued based on its earnings, thanks in part to the growing profitability of its e-commerce business.
The company has generated trailing 12-month earnings of $8.37 per share, placing its stock at a price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio of 27.1. Once again, it's much cheaper than the Nasdaq-100, which trades at a P/E ratio of 34.4.
Amazon stock also has a forward P/E ratio of 22.9, based on Wall Street's consensus earnings estimate for 2027.
Data by YCharts.
That means Amazon stock would have to soar by 50% by the end of next year just to trade in line with the P/E ratio of the Nasdaq-100 (assuming it remains constant). That isn't unrealistic, considering the stock spent most of the last five years with a P/E of above 30.
As a result, I think Amazon has far more upside potential than an expensive name like SpaceX.
by Todd Bishop on Jun 29, 2026 at 8:32 amJune 29, 2026 at 8:55 am
Adobe says shoppers arriving from AI chatbots were more likely to convert into sales for online retailers during Prime Day. (BigStock Photo) U.S. shoppers spent a record $26.4 billion across all retail sites during Amazon’s four-day Prime Day event, and for the first time, the people most likely to complete a purchase were those who arrived from AI chatbots.
It’s the latest twist in a high-stakes bet by Amazon. The AI assistants now sending retailers their best-converting customers are the same ones Amazon has worked to keep away from its own store, hoping to keep shoppers coming directly to Amazon.com and using its own on-site AI assistant instead.
Adobe reported over that weekend that visitors who clicked through to shopping sites from AI assistants were 40% more likely to make a purchase during the four-day event than those showing up through search, email or social media.
AI still accounts for a small fraction of total shopping traffic, but a trend is starting to emerge. In the past, shoppers sent by AI were the least likely to buy, according to Adobe’s data. The change suggests that ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and others are becoming more effective at giving shoppers the information they need to buy with confidence.
Those figures span all of U.S. retail — “Prime Day” has become much more than a day, and much bigger than Amazon alone. The distinction matters, because Amazon has taken a different path than many of its rivals. While Walmart, Target and others have opened their catalogs to outside AI assistants, Amazon has kept them out.
Agentic AI drives less than 1% of traffic across every major online store, but Amazon’s share is the lowest of the group, at about 0.4%, according to J.P. Morgan data.
That’s by design: Amazon sued Perplexity, for example, over its browser that shopped on customers’ behalf, and won a preliminary injunction barring the tool from the logged-in parts of its site, arguing that unauthorized shopping agents degrade a trusted experience. Perplexity is appealing.
Amazon has separately blocked ChatGPT’s crawlers from reading its listings — even as it has begun buying ads inside ChatGPT to bring shoppers back, a move first spotted by Marketplace Pulse founder Juozas Kaziukėnas and reported by Business Insider and Modern Retail.
On Amazon’s most recent earnings call, in April, CEO Andy Jassy said the company was in talks with the AI companies to come up with a better experience between Amazon and third-party agents to “find something that works for customers and all the companies.”
In the meantime, Amazon is focusing on its own AI assistant.
The tool — launched as Rufus and folded in May into a service called Alexa for Shopping — has drawn more than 250 million users, with monthly users up more than 115% over the past year, the company said. Customers who use it while shopping are more than 60% more likely to buy, and Amazon Web Services has said the tool drove nearly $12 billion in incremental sales last year.
Jassy said on the earnings call that third-party agents weren’t good enough yet — that they lacked a shopper’s history and often couldn’t get prices right — and that people would gravitate to whichever assistant knew them best. That’s the opening Amazon is going after with its own AI chatbot and related tools on Amazon.com.
“We are aiming to have it be the best shopping assistant anywhere,” Jassy said.
The strategy reflects one of the ways Amazon is increasingly making money. Advertising is now among its most profitable businesses. J.P. Morgan expects it to bring in about $83 billion in revenue this year and, because the margins are high, to account for roughly a third of the company’s operating income.
That advertising revenue depends on Amazon getting shoppers to browse its own site rather than handing the decision to an outside chatbot it doesn’t control.
The big question long-term is whether Amazon can maintain its own role as a primary destination for shoppers and avoid becoming just another selection on a chatbot’s shelf.
Amazon (AMZN) is finally upgraded to Strong Buy, as I saw a highly compelling entry point after recent underperformance and a pullback below $245. AMZN's aggressive CapEx and cloud capacity buildout position it to dominate AI infrastructure and monetize the higher-margin token-as-a-service layer. Despite near-term negative free cash flow margins projected through FY2026, analysts expect a positive inflection in 2027 and margin recovery toward 8% by FY2028. Not expected to be permanent.
I keep buying Amazon every time the bears hand me a headline like the falling $47.66 average Prime Day order, and I am not stopping now. The narrative writes itself: smaller baskets, dead consumer, end of e-commerce dominance. Then I look at the actual receipt. Total digital spending across the four-day event rose 9.3% to a record $26.4 billion because a flood of shoppers placed multiple separate orders. That is Amazon quietly becoming the country’s non-discretionary online utility, and I will keep clicking buy while the crowd argues about basket size.
Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN | AMZN Price Prediction) is on sale at $232.69, down 14.41% in the past month and down 10.94% in June alone. That is my entry point.
Why the basket math misses the point The bear case treats a small order as a loss. I see it as the second, third, and fourth purchase a household used to make at a strip mall. With the University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index at 44.8, deep in recessionary territory, frightened consumers reroute their spending. BEA food spending hit a fresh high of $1,566.8 billion in May 2026, and total PCE climbed to $22,059.8 billion. The dollars exist. Amazon is intercepting them.
The three numbers behind my conviction First, AWS is reaccelerating. The cloud arm posted $37.587 billion in Q1 2026 revenue, up 28% year over year, the fastest growth in 15 quarters, at a 37.7% operating margin. OpenAI committed to roughly 2 GW of Trainium capacity through AWS starting 2027, and Anthropic locked in up to 5 GW. The custom chips business cleared a $20 billion annual run rate, growing triple digits.
Second, advertising is the quiet compounder. $17.243 billion in Q1, up 24%, with TTM revenue above $70 billion. Every extra Prime Day order, even a tiny one, is another high-margin ad impression. That is exactly the engine my thesis depends on: low-margin retail visits converted into high-margin recurring cash flow.
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Third, profitability is bending up at scale. Q1 EPS landed at $2.78 against a $1.653 estimate, the fifth consecutive beat. Operating income grew 29.6% to $23.85 billion, North America operating margin expanded to 7.9% from 6.3%, and unit growth hit 15%, the highest reading since the tail end of lockdowns. Operating cash flow rose 52.99% to $26.03 billion.
The risk I will not paper over Capital intensity is the real argument against the stock. Capex hit $44.203 billion in Q1 alone, up 76.68%, with management guiding toward roughly $200 billion of 2026 capex for AI infrastructure, chips, robotics, and satellites. Trailing free cash flow collapsed 95% to $1.2 billion, and long-term debt climbed to $119.1 billion from $65.6 billion. If AI demand cools, those data centers depreciate while interest expense compounds.
I sit with that risk and keep buying. The offtake is already signed. Project Rainier runs 500,000-plus Trainium2 chips for Anthropic, Trainium2 is fully subscribed, and Bedrock is used by more than 100,000 companies. This capex is building inventory that already has buyers under contract.
Why my buy button stays active I am accumulating a $2.50 trillion business that runs the internet’s compute layer, prints over $70 billion in trailing advertising revenue, and just delivered more than 1 billion items same-day or overnight in 2026 and counting. The bears can keep counting basket sizes. I will keep counting shares.
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Prime Day generates billions of dollars in sales and dominates headlines every summer. It just generated a record $26.4 billion in sales across the four-day event last week. Yet focusing only on Amazon‘s (NASDAQ:AMZN | AMZN Price Prediction) annual shopping event misses the much bigger story.
The company has quietly transformed itself into one of the world’s most integrated technology platforms, combining cloud computing, artificial intelligence, logistics, advertising, satellite communications, and digital commerce under one roof. Few companies possess that breadth. Even fewer have managed to make each business strengthen the others.
For long-term investors, those connections — not discounted electronics — may ultimately prove to be Amazon’s greatest competitive advantage.
Amazon’s Competitive Moat Keeps Getting Wider Amazon’s biggest strength isn’t any single business. It’s how all of its businesses reinforce one another.
The company’s retail operations introduced more than 260 million Prime members worldwide, creating one of the largest recurring subscription ecosystems anywhere. Those members spend more, shop more frequently, stream Prime Video, use Amazon Music, and increasingly interact with Amazon’s growing advertising platform.
Meanwhile, Amazon Web Services (AWS) continues serving as one of the foundations of the global cloud industry. AWS generated approximately $37.6 billion in quarterly revenue as enterprises accelerate AI deployments. Every new AI model requires computing power, storage, networking, and security — services AWS already provides at enormous scale.
Company Primary Strength Strategic Advantage Amazon Cloud, AI, commerce, logistics, advertising Vertically integrated ecosystem Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) Enterprise software and Azure Deep enterprise relationships Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG) Search, cloud, AI Data and advertising leadership Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) AI chips Dominant AI accelerator hardware Amazon stands apart because it controls nearly every layer — from fulfillment centers and warehouses to cloud infrastructure and AI chips.
AI Infrastructure Could Be the Next Growth Engine The AI boom is expanding Amazon’s opportunity well beyond online shopping.
One area attracting growing attention is Project Kuiper, Amazon’s low-Earth-orbit satellite network. Much like Starlink transformed SpaceX (NASDAQ:SPCX) into a communications infrastructure company, Kuiper gives Amazon the ability to design its own satellites, customer terminals, and networking systems while extending AWS closer to customers through edge computing. Over time, that vertical integration could create powerful synergies between cloud services and global connectivity.
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Amazon is also reducing its dependence on outside chip suppliers. Its Trainium2 processors are ramping faster than any previous AWS custom silicon platform while delivering roughly 30% to 40% better price-performance than many traditional GPU alternatives for AI workloads. Management also disclosed approximately $225 billion in customer commitments supporting future infrastructure demand, with much of today’s Trainium capacity already reserved. It may soon start selling the chips to third-party customers.
Advertising is quietly becoming another major earnings driver. Amazon says Prime Video advertisements now reach approximately 315 million viewers worldwide, creating another recurring revenue stream layered on top of its commerce ecosystem.
Cash Burn Looks Scary — Until You Look Deeper Granted, Amazon isn’t a textbook value stock. The company continues spending enormous sums building AI data centers, expanding logistics infrastructure, and launching Kuiper satellites. Free cash flow has turned negative as capital expenditures surged, Amazon pays no dividend, repurchases virtually no shares, and stock-based compensation continues creating shareholder dilution.
Those concerns deserve attention, but context matters. The company generated approximately $148.5 billion in trailing operating cash flow while holding more than $153 billion in cash and short-term investments — more than double its 2022 balance. Those figures give Amazon flexibility that many competitors simply don’t possess.
Investors are right to question whether today’s AI spending can continue indefinitely. However, companies like Amazon, Alphabet, and Nvidia currently have the balance sheets necessary to fund that investment without placing meaningful financial stress on their businesses.
Key Takeaway In short, Amazon has become much more than the world’s largest online retailer. It now operates one of the most interconnected technology ecosystems ever assembled, spanning cloud computing, AI infrastructure, satellite communications, logistics, advertising, and digital commerce.
The stock may not be deeply undervalued, and heavy capital spending will likely pressure free cash flow for some time. Regardless, Amazon has followed this playbook for decades — reinvesting aggressively today to widen its competitive moat tomorrow. With $148 billion in operating cash flow, more than $153 billion in liquidity, and multiple AI-driven growth engines still in their early stages, the company appears well positioned to turn today’s spending into tomorrow’s earnings power. For patient investors, that’s a trade-off worth understanding.
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What do hedge funds see in Amazon (AMZN +2.44%) right now? The answer is likely "value." Large funds, including Bill Ackman's Pershing Square and Appaloosa Management, have reportedly increased their positions in Amazon. Their underlying thesis is that Amazon is undervalued relative to other artificial intelligence and cloud computing companies.
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More pure-play or native AI and cloud computing businesses, such as Nvidia (NVDA 1.42%) and Intel (INTC 3.20%), have seen their valuations become so inflated that it can be hard to justify their prices. Nvidia trades at 18 times trailing sales and Intel commands a 12x price-to-sales ratio nowadays.
Amazon is an e-commerce platform that also owns Amazon Web Services, and that hybrid structure is what has the company trading at more reasonable multiples. Amazon's P/S ratio? A modest 3.4x.
Image source: The Motley Fool.
Amazon's stock is relatively flat in 2026 and up just over 7% in the past 12 months as of this writing. Its forward and trailing P/E ratios are hovering around 30. The stock is currently trading at less than 4 times sales.
As is the trend with AI-related companies, Amazon's biggest risk is its heavy AI capex. Amazon anticipates spending around $200 billion on AI infrastructure this year alone. Competition in the space is fierce, but Amazon has a strong, diversified business that truly gives it a leg up. It's understandable why hedge funds would be loading up on shares. If you can stomach the heavy spending on AI, then Amazon is one of the better-priced stocks in the space.
Catie Hogan has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Amazon, Intel, and Nvidia. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
An Amazon box moves along a conveyor belt at Amazon?s fulfillment center in Robbinsville, New Jersey, U.S., December 1, 2025. REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz// Purchase Licensing Rights, opens new tab
SummaryCompaniesU.S. online shoppers spent more than $26.4 billion during June 23 to June 26, Adobe Analytics saidNumerator said average Prime Day order size fell to $47.66 from $53.34Adobe said discounts matched last year's levels, suggesting promotions may stay heavy into holidaysNEW YORK, June 27 (Reuters) - U.S. online shoppers clawed for deals on electronics, appliances, items for children and everyday essentials during Amazon.com's (AMZN.O), opens new tab annual sales event Prime Day, spending more than $26.4 billion from June 23 through June 26, according to data firm Adobe Analytics.
The multibillion-dollar spend marks a 9.3% year-over-year increase that retail experts attribute to high inflation coupled with shoppers' purchasing of more discretionary, long-lasting products.
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Adobe said that strong discounts during the four-day Prime event drove many shoppers to purchase higher-priced items including electronics, toys, appliances and personal care products, meaning that retailers may have to continue offering deep discounts to get their products off the shelves for the holiday season.
In addition to discounts, tax refunds "could have provided a sizable tailwind to a lot of these discretionary categories," CFRA Research analyst Arun Sundaram said. Tax refunds will not be a factor for most shoppers in the fall and winter months.
Tax refund amounts increased 11.1% to $3,462 in 2026, according to data from the U.S. Internal Revenue Service, giving shoppers a financial boost to help with purchases they had been holding off on, Sundaram said.
Shoppers also purchased kids' items and apparel ahead of back-to-school season, personal hygiene products and home goods, signaling that the Prime Day customers aimed to stock up on products "that they were going to buy anyway," Sonia Lapinsky, managing director of retail at consultancy Alix Partners, said.
"It's really pointing to that fatigued consumer. They're not necessarily spending more-- they're just trying to spread what they have over better deals and discounts," she said.
Prime Day deals were on par with last year's discounts, according to Adobe. Discounts for electronics averaged 24% compared to last year's discounts of 23% , apparel at 24% compared to 23% and toys at 20% versus last year's 19%.
A separate survey by data firm Numerator, which tracked more than 178,000 Prime Day orders, showed that the average order size was $47.66, down from $53.34, a signal that some experts say shows that consumer strength is waning.
Reporting by Arriana McLymore in New York; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab
Arriana McLymore is a New York-based reporter covering e-commerce, online marketplaces, alternative revenue streams for retailers and in-store innovation. She previously reported on telecoms and the business of law.
Space Exploration Technologies (SPCX 0.88%) has quickly become the most talked-about stock on the market after its gargantuan IPO. For a brief moment in the days after its debut, its market cap soared above Amazon's (AMZN +0.44%).
A bit of these gains have been given up, with SpaceX now trading at a market cap of around $2 trillion as of this writing after the close on June 23. However, there is still clearly extreme optimism around SpaceX and its ambitions to dominate the satellite internet and artificial intelligence (AI) markets, with an addressable market projection in the trillions.
At similar prices, which stock is the better buy: SpaceX, the newcomer, or Amazon? The answer is clear when you get past the headlines.
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Revenue and earnings size There is no comparing SpaceX and Amazon financially right now. In 2025, SpaceX generated $18.7 billion in revenue and reported a $2.6 billion loss from operations. In that same year, Amazon's revenue was $717 billion with operating income of $80 billion.
Amazon's business is significantly more mature than SpaceX's, with a sprawling logistics empire and e-commerce platform spanning the globe, along with a cloud computing division, Amazon Web Services (AWS), that leads its field with $129 billion in revenue.
SpaceX is growing faster on a percentage basis, with 33% revenue growth compared to 12% at Amazon last year. However, when you compare the $638 billion in revenue Amazon generated in 2024 to the $717 billion it generated last year, the company grew revenue by around four times the entire size of SpaceX's business in a single year. This should illustrate the different financial scales on which these two businesses operate.
Image source: Getty Images.
Closer market potential Looking to the future, both SpaceX and Amazon are pursuing similar markets, aside from Amazon's mature e-commerce empire. Amazon is not trying to directly compete with SpaceX in rocket launches, but that is not a huge market, with SpaceX holding dominant market share today and generating only $4 billion in revenue from its space segment last year.
The two companies overlap in satellite internet and AI data center services. SpaceX's Starlink internet service generated $11.4 billion in revenue last year, up 50% year over year. The company estimates an addressable market of over $1 trillion across the broadband and mobile internet sectors, which it aims to disrupt. Amazon is an up-and-coming competitor to Starlink, investing billions in a satellite constellation it calls Amazon Leo, which should be fully operational within a few years. SpaceX remains far in the lead, though.
SpaceX is trying to tackle the AI data center sector with its acquisition of xAI and major infrastructure investments. It recently signed deals worth tens of billions of dollars annually but generated only $3.2 billion in revenue last year, including revenue from the company formerly known as Twitter. AWS, as mentioned above, generates $129 billion in annual revenue and continues to grow at an impressive clip.
SPCX Market Cap data by YCharts
Why Amazon is clearly the better buy
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SpaceX clearly has potential, but Amazon also has massive potential and an existing business that generates significant profits. That cannot be said for the rocket flight and AI business today. SpaceX trades at a price-to-sales ratio (P/S) of over 100 compared to its 2025 revenue. Amazon trades at a price-to-earnings ratio (P/E) -- much different than sales -- of 28.
Smart investors know that valuation matters above all else. Unless SpaceX can miraculously accelerate its revenue growth to 100% annually over the next few years, this current market cap of $2 trillion looks extreme compared to Amazon's massive earnings power. Amazon stock is likely the much better buy for investors over the next few years.
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An AWS data center Noah Berger/Getty Images via Amazon Web Services Amazon raised prices for several key AI cloud offerings, the latest sign that memory chip shortages are driving up the cost of some technology.
Amazon Web Services recently announced price increases for EC2 Capacity Blocks for ML. This is a cloud service that lets companies reserve GPUs in advance.
The changes mean hourly rates for renting several types of cloud servers will jump by roughly 20% starting in July. AWS had already raised prices for the same service by about 15% in January.
"Amazon EC2 Capacity Blocks for ML reservation prices are updated periodically based on supply and demand," the company said in its announcement. Amazon didn't immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday.
Similar price increases are happening in other parts of the tech industry, as tech giants pass memory price pressure on to customers. Apple raised prices this week, blaming soaring memory chip costs. Xbox did the same, and Elon Musk complained about unprecedented memory price increases.
The AWS move is more consequential than your next MacBook or gaming console costing a couple of hundred dollars more. As the world's largest cloud provider, AWS underpins many software services, and millions of developers rely on the cloud service to offer apps and other tech products. Price increases of 15% and now 20% will likely ripple through these sectors in coming quarters.
The price hikes reflect a broader shift in tech: AI is increasingly constrained by physical limitations, rather than software availability. Tight memory chip supply and strong GPU demand are raising costs for cloud providers.
One of the biggest physical constraints right now is high-bandwidth memory, a critical component packaged alongside advanced AI chips. AI cloud services run on these chips and servers, so shortages and price increases like this have a big impact on data center expansion plans and, ultimately, the supply of AI.
"As there is a limit to how much memory can be produced, then there is a limit to how many GPUs can be produced, which means that there's a limit to how many data centers can be built," Peter Berezin, chief economist at BCA Research, wrote on X on Friday.
Berezin added that cloud providers can pass on higher infrastructure costs because customers have few alternatives when GPU capacity is scarce, giving hyperscalers AWS, Microsoft, Google, and Oracle greater pricing power.
"While the memory shortage raises their costs, it also keeps the demand for compute above the available supply, which gives them greater pricing power over access to cloud computing," Berezin wrote on X.
The same shortages pushing up AI cloud prices have propelled memory-chip makers such as Micron and SK Hynix to records, reflecting investor expectations that AI-driven demand will keep the market tight, and prices high, for years.
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Eugene is Business Insider’s Chief Tech Correspondent, where he leads coverage of Amazon. His reporting spans the company’s retail operations, AWS, Alexa, and its secretive internal work culture.Previously, he worked at CNBC, Fortune Magazine Korea, and Japan's Yomiuri Shimbun. He holds degrees from NYU and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.In 2022, Eugene broke a story uncovering Amazon’s practice of deceptively enrolling customers in Prime and deliberately making cancellation difficult. A year later, the Federal Trade Commission sued the company, citing his reporting. That case culminated in a record $2.5 billion settlement in 2025.His reporting has earned multiple honors, including the SF Press Club’s Bay Area Journalism Award and SPJ NorCal’s Excellence in Journalism Award.Eugene lives in the Bay Area. Contact him via email at [email protected], or Signal, Telegram, or WhatsApp at 650-942-3061. Use a personal email address, a nonwork WiFi network, and a nonwork device; here's our guide to sharing information securely. ExpertiseAmazon, Jeff Bezos, Andy Jassy, e-commerce, and cloud computing.Popular ArticlesAmazon:Internal Amazon emails give an exclusive look at how CEO Andy Jassy has started to run the company, with obsessive attention to the retail business and what some employees feel is micromanagingAndy Jassy will be the next CEO of Amazon. Insiders dish on what it's like to work for Jeff Bezos' successor, who built AWS into a $40 billion business.Internal documents show Amazon has for years knowingly tricked people into signing up for Prime subscriptions. 'We have been deliberately confusing,' former employee says.Inside Amazon's flailing brick-and-mortar ambitions: missed projections, pressure to cut costs, and a war with Whole FoodsInside Amazon's complex employee-review system, where workers feel left in the dark and managers expect to give 5% of reports bad reviewsAfter 28 years, 'Day 2' finally arrives at AmazonAWS, Alexa, healthcare:Inside Amazon's struggle to break into the lucrative market for SaaS business applications, including an internal pitch to buy $38 billion HubSpotInside Amazon's struggle to crack Nvidia's AI-chip dominanceAmazon's AI data center dream runs into the reality of 'zombie' facilities, higher costs, and labor shortagesAmazon is gutting its voice assistant, Alexa. Employees describe a division in crisis and huge losses on 'a wasted opportunity.'Amazon is working on a new 'Remarkable Alexa,' but internal politics and technical issues plague the projectAmazon projected huge losses from its healthcare business in 2024, but strong sales growth, internal document reveals
AWS Cloud Computing Amazon More Amazon Web Services Apple Inflation Artificial Intelligence
Amazon-backed AMZN Anthropic is getting a stronger read from Wells Fargo after recent checks showed its Fable 5 AI models are delivering notable coding improvements for customers, according to Seeking Alpha reporting.
Wells Fargo analysts said they spoke with 2 engineering leaders at AI startups who briefly tested Fable 5 and described a step function improvement in AI performance. Both said the higher return on investment was worth the higher token cost, which can easily top $100 an hour.
The key change appears to be autonomy. Wells Fargo said Fable 5 is much better at completing high-ROI, long-running coding tasks on the first try, compared with earlier models that often required multiple attempts and human and AI review. The checks also suggested Fable can work with less supervision than prior versions.
Hence, it's clear that Anthropic may be pushing the AI model conversation from raw benchmark scores toward real enterprise productivity. Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5 are priced at $10 per 1M input tokens and $50 per 1M output tokens, making the next test whether customers keep paying premium prices for better coding performance.
Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL | AAPL Price Prediction) and Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) both posted record quarters, then collided with opposing forces: AI memory demand. Apple confirmed sweeping hardware price increases tied to a 20% “chipflation” tax, while Amazon collects rent on the data center buildout causing it.
Apple Sells the Device. Amazon Rents the Cloud. Apple’s March quarter was its best ever, with revenue of $111.184 billion and iPhone revenue of $56.994 billion on iPhone 17 demand. Tim Cook called it “our best March quarter ever”. Then reality intruded. Cook later said hardware increases were “unavoidable” as memory makers chase fatter AI server margins, with the base MacBook Air pushed to $1,299 and $1,300 added to high-end Mac Studios.
Amazon sits on the other end of that supply chain. AWS grew 28%, its fastest in 15 quarters, while the custom silicon business cleared a $20 billion annual run rate. Anthropic locked in up to 5 GW of Trainium, and OpenAI committed roughly 2 GW starting in 2027. Amazon profits from the same memory crunch squeezing Cupertino.
Business Driver Apple Amazon Main Growth Engine iPhone 17 hardware cycle AWS and custom AI silicon Exposure to Chip Costs Direct margin headwind Direct revenue tailwind Capital Strategy $100 billion buyback $200B AI capex reinvested Premium Consumer Retreat Meets Utility-Style Ecosystem Reddit is flagging pricing pain. A thread titled “Apple Raises Prices on Macs, iPads by $200 or More on Some Models” pulled 331 upvotes and dominated AAPL chatter into June 25. Apple raised upgrade costs at the exact moment investors want proof of mass-market AI device adoption.
Amazon’s playbook looks more insulated. Advertising crossed $70 billion TTM, Stores unit growth hit 15%, and Andy Jassy guided Q2 sales to $194 billion to $199 billion. The catch is cash. Q1 capex hit $44.203 billion and TTM free cash flow collapsed 95% to $1.2 billion. Reddit’s loudest worry, “Worried for hyperscalers…Overinvestment in data centres can cause a multiyear downturn,”, has merit.
The Next Test Is Whether Upgrades Hold I will watch whether higher Mac and iPad prices stall the holiday upgrade cycle. Polymarket already shows only a 28.8% probability AAPL closes June above $280, even with 96.1% confidence in an iPhone 18 launch. For Amazon, the question is margin durability against capex. Crowds give 94.8% odds capex tops $170 billion this year.
Why I Lean Toward Amazon Through This Memory Cycle For investors focused on defensive brand power and shareholder yield, Apple’s case remains intact. The Services line hit $30.976 billion, and that recurring stream cushions hardware volatility. I would rather be on the receiving end of chipflation than the paying end. Amazon’s 13.7% drawdown since earnings reflects capex anxiety while the underlying business remains healthy. If memory prices stay elevated into 2027, AWS and Trainium customers get stickier and Apple’s bill of materials gets heavier. I would change my view if Apple absorbed the cost hike without a demand hit, but early consumer reaction suggests that is unlikely.
CANADA - 2026/06/19: In this photo illustration, the AWS (Amazon Web Services) logo is seen displayed on a smartphone screen. (Photo Illustration by Thomas Fuller/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
This article was written by Doug Nathman, with research by his team at Trefis.
Worries in the market regarding Amazon's significant investment in AI might underestimate the impressive proprietary technology being developed to support it.
Despite a history of fast surges, Amazon has felt rather constrained as of late, trading sideways for nearly six months. A key question among investors is: will the company’s significant investment in artificial intelligence yield a substantial return, or will this expenditure not produce adequate returns?
However, concentrating on the spending overlooks the more critical narrative. Amazon’s approach in the fiercely competitive AI arena encompasses more than just simple purchases; the firm is constructing the vital infrastructure. In doing so, it is stealthily establishing itself as one of the most significant semiconductor manufacturers globally.
Is Amazon Among The Top Three Global Chip Firms?Buried within the most recent earnings call was a striking claim from management: if its custom silicon division operated independently, its yearly revenue run rate would be $50 billion. To provide context, the company asserts its “custom silicon segment is now one of the top three data center chip enterprises worldwide.” This isn’t merely a secondary endeavor. This is a strategic cornerstone slowly materializing in plain view, centered on two primary products: Graviton for general computing and Trainium for AI applications.
While the public perceives AWS primarily as a cloud service provider, it is swiftly transforming into a vertically integrated powerhouse. It has progressed from simply leasing server space to designing and implementing its own high-performance, cost-effective silicon to operate that space. And customers are eagerly awaiting their turn.
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Demand Has Already Surpassed SupplyThis isn’t a theoretical edge; the demand is tangible and urgent. The company’s Trainium2 AI chip is already “primarily sold out.” Its successor, Trainium3, which has just commenced shipping, is “almost fully subscribed.” Most notably, Amazon reports that “a large portion of Trainium4, which is still approximately 18 months from widespread availability, has already been booked.”
When clients are reserving hardware that is set to be available in a year and a half, it indicates a strong demand for the unique price-performance ratio that Amazon is presenting. The customer base extends far beyond AI startups. Tech titan Meta recently “committed to utilizing tens of millions of Graviton cores” to advance its own AI initiatives, opting for Amazon’s custom CPU that delivers up to “40% superior price performance” compared to alternatives.
How Is This Addressing The Spending Concern?This is the vital connection. The bearish argument against Amazon is predicated on the massive cost of its AI expansion. However, creating its own chips fundamentally alters the cost dynamics of that investment. Management has been clear about the benefits, indicating that at scale, it anticipates Trainium will “save us tens of billions of dollars in capital expenditures every year.”
In addition to the cost savings, it establishes a robust competitive advantage. The company forecasts that its in-house silicon will “yield several hundred basis points of operating margin advantage compared to relying on external chips.” In a business as substantial as AWS, which currently operates at a $150 billion annualized revenue run rate, such margin enhancement is a powerful catalyst for profit.
While investors have been closely examining every dollar of capital spending, Amazon has been developing the very technology that could significantly enhance that capital's efficiency. It answers the market's most pressing question, suggesting that the company is evolving beyond mere participation in the AI revolution to construct a foundational, high-margin engine to sustain it for years ahead.
Where Will An Opportunity Like This First Manifest?An opportunity of this nature only counts once it begins to reflect in the financial figures, and the first concrete indication is in management’s outlook. The instant a company can actually anticipate new revenue, it adjusts its forecast, and an upward adjustment that the market is already rewarding serves as some of the clearest evidence that a narrative like this is becoming a reality.
A growth narrative this credible warrants action, but investing through a single stock means accepting all the fluctuations that one company experiences. A more intelligent strategy is to maintain a collection of stocks where the long-term perspective is equally robust, ensuring that the sustainable upside remains intact and no unexpected event can compromise it. This is how patient capital flourishes.
Differentiating the genuinely sustainable narratives from the merely appealing ones is the foundation of the Trefis methodology. The Trefis High Quality (HQ) Portfolio assesses the complete picture of quality across thousands of stocks, not just a single factor, retains the 30 strongest selections, and re-balances them with careful discipline. It possesses a track record of outperforming a benchmark that merges the three major indices – the S&P 500, S&P Mid-cap, and Russell 2000.
Analyst’s Disclosure: I/we have a beneficial long position in the shares of AMZN either through stock ownership, options, or other derivatives. I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it (other than from Seeking Alpha). I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article.
Seeking Alpha's Disclosure: Past performance is no guarantee of future results. No recommendation or advice is being given as to whether any investment is suitable for a particular investor. Any views or opinions expressed above may not reflect those of Seeking Alpha as a whole. Seeking Alpha is not a licensed securities dealer, broker or US investment adviser or investment bank. Our analysts are third party authors that include both professional investors and individual investors who may not be licensed or certified by any institute or regulatory body.
SummaryAmazon might have seen a sharp correction in the past month, but I believe it's due for an uptick now even as some risks persist.With the macroeconomic situation easing, consumer confidence can improve and inflation can subside, stoking further growth for its big e-commerce segment and sustaining improved margins.After a strong Q1 2026 and the company's positive outlook for Q2 2026, my estimates for 2026 have been upgraded, with net income projections indicating attractive forward multiples.There are risks, though, in the form of a negative free cash flow, higher debt, interest expenses and renewed labor challenges. But these are contained risks for now.Looking for more investing ideas like this one? Get them exclusively at Green Growth Giants. Learn More »Sitewide Sale 2026: Get 20% Off Getty Images
Even though Amazon's (AMZN) is up by an impressive 11% since I last wrote about in February, it's hard to overlook its 15% drop in the past month. A month ago, this drop would have continued to encourage caution. Stressors were already present
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Analyst’s Disclosure: I/we have no stock, option or similar derivative position in any of the companies mentioned, and no plans to initiate any such positions within the next 72 hours. I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it (other than from Seeking Alpha). I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article.
Seeking Alpha's Disclosure: Past performance is no guarantee of future results. No recommendation or advice is being given as to whether any investment is suitable for a particular investor. Any views or opinions expressed above may not reflect those of Seeking Alpha as a whole. Seeking Alpha is not a licensed securities dealer, broker or US investment adviser or investment bank. Our analysts are third party authors that include both professional investors and individual investors who may not be licensed or certified by any institute or regulatory body.
Amazon.com stock is trading in a tight range. What should traders watch with AMZN? The Capex OverhangFirst quarter 2026 revenue came in at $181.5 billion with a 70% EPS beat, and AWS revenue surged 28% year-over-year, its fastest growth in 15 quarters. The tension between strong business results and shrinking free cash flow is the central debate for Amazon investors right now.
The Prime Day QuestionThe Insider Selling OverhangRecent SEC filings show approximately $51.6 million in insider sales over the past three months with zero corresponding insider purchases, a pattern that has dampened market sentiment and added to technical downside pressure. The stock is currently trading roughly 12% below its 52-week high of $278.56, with a consensus analyst price target of $309.24 implying significant upside if the capex concerns prove manageable.
Amazon Shares Edge LowerAMZN Price Action: At the time of publication, Amazon shares are trading 0.08% higher at $227.20, according to data from Benzinga Pro.
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This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors.
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Amazon (AMZN 3.38%) has a lot going for it. The company has a huge e-commerce business that has transformed how people shop and disrupted the brick-and-mortar retail model. And its Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the biggest cloud computing company in the world, with a market share of nearly 30%.
The company also is emerging as a key player in satellite internet service. Its Amazon Leo is seeking to compete with Starlink, the satellite internet service of Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, in operating networks of low-orbit satellites to provide mobile service and internet to underserved and rural areas.
Despite all this, Amazon shares aren't getting much love. Of all the members of the "Magnificent Seven" cohort, it has been the worst-performing stock, gaining only 33% over the last five years.
AMZN data by YCharts.
Why is Amazon struggling despite everything it has going for it? Let's take a look.
The headwinds facing Amazon The company's e-commerce business is huge, but it's also very expensive. The problem is that it doesn't make much money despite generating hundreds of billions in sales every year.
In the first quarter, it had $181.5 billion in sales -- an impressive figure. Of that, $143.9 billion came from Amazon.com's domestic and international sales. But those sales also recorded $134.24 billion in expenses, leaving a small profit margin of just 6.7%.
Image source: The Motley Fool.
AWS is much more profitable and growing faster. In the first quarter, its sales were $37.58 billion, up 28.4% from a year ago. The segment generated $14.16 billion in profits, giving it a much healthier profit margin of 37.6%.
AWS is the most appealing part of Amazon's growth story right now. Grand View Research estimates that the cloud computing market is worth $1.1 trillion this year, up from $943 billion in 2025. And it forecasts that the industry will grow to $3.35 trillion by 2033, with a compound annual rate of 16%.
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That's why hyperscalers like Amazon are building up their cloud computing capacity and buying GPUs from companies like Nvidia hand over fist. It had $131.8 billion in capital expenditures (capex) in 2025 and estimates it will spend $200 billion this year.
That's a scary number for many investors. AI chips such as GPUs are incredibly powerful, and you need to bundle hundreds of them in data centers to train and run AI programs. But GPUs also have a short lifespan because companies like Nvidia are constantly working to improve them and make them more powerful. So it's only natural for investors to question if Amazon and its peers can expect a reasonable return on their investments.
Amazon doubles down on AI According to Reuters, CEO Andy Jassy projected that AWS will reach $600 billion in annual sales within a decade, doubling his previous estimate. At that rate, the segment would grow by about 17% per year, based on AWS' 2025 sales of $128.7 billion.
Jassy said AI provides a "very unusual opportunity to build this very large business, and we have very clear and significant demand signals. We're not just spending the $200 billion of capex because we're hoping AI is going to be big."
The size of the company's bet on AI is facing skepticism from Wall Street today, a major reason it is underperforming the rest of the Magnificent Seven. I think Amazon stock is still a buy, but only if you have a long-term investment horizon.
Patrick Sanders has positions in Nvidia. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
Amazon (AMZN 3.38%) Prime Days is happening, and the results of the big sales event could drive more attention to the stock. While Amazon's commerce business is the most consumer-facing, I don't think it's the best reason to buy the stock. Instead, I think Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a better reason.
AWS is the real reason Amazon is now highly profitable, and with its superior growth rate, I think it's by far the top reason to buy the stock right now.
Image source: The Motley Fool.
AWS is small, but mighty In Q1, AWS accounted for only 21% of Amazon's total revenue, generating about $37.6 billion. However, this figure is dwarfed by its commerce divisions, which generated $39.8 billion in international revenue and $104 billion in North American revenue. That's a huge difference, but revenue isn't everything.
Commerce and cloud computing have two entirely different margin profiles, and despite AWS's small size, it actually accounted for 59% of Amazon's operating profits in Q1. That's not a one-time anomaly that occurred in Q1; this trend persists throughout the year.
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With AWS generating the majority of Amazon's profits, it steers the company's direction. Furthermore, AWS is growing substantially faster than its commerce businesses, too. In Q1, North America commerce grew 12% year over year while international sales rose 19%. AWS rose at a 28% rate. When the most profitable segment is also the fastest-growing, that bodes well for the company, and is a big reason why Amazon's profits are growing faster than its revenue.
This pattern is likely to continue, as Amazon is investing a jaw-dropping $200 billion in data center capital expenditures this year to meet demand for AI workloads. That kind of spending needs to result in solid, long-term growth, and Amazon's CEO Andy Jassy has already told investors that customers are lined up to use the majority of this newly built computing power once it's online. That's great news for investors, and with Amazon's custom chips driving triple-digit revenue growth in that segment, the company has a lot of positives in its AWS division.
To top things off, Amazon's stock currently looks like a bit of a Prime Day deal itself.
AMZN Price to CFO Per Share (TTM) data by YCharts
Amazon's stock is seldom this cheap from a cash flow perspective, and with the stock down about 15% from its all-time high, now is the perfect time to buy some shares.
Amazon (AMZN 3.38%) is already a leader in several industries, including e-commerce and cloud computing. However, a company this successful, if it wants to remain so, should always be looking to improve and tap into new growth opportunities. That's what Amazon has been doing over the past few years, notably through its healthcare-related initiatives, as well as a new business line in which it will open its logistics network to other corporations. And now, Amazon is apparently actively exploring selling its Trainium franchise of custom artificial intelligence (AI) chips. Could this become an important growth driver for the company?
Image source: The Motley Fool.
Already a multibillion-dollar business The AI revolution is in full swing. Nvidia's (NVDA 1.86%) GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) have been instrumental in helping companies train and deploy AI models in recent years, and they should remain among the defining hardware of this era for the foreseeable future. However, Amazon and other hyperscalers started designing Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) as alternatives to GPUs to decrease costs, improve margins, and boost efficiency. Amazon argues that its Trainium chips offer better price-to-performance than comparable GPUs. If Amazon starts selling these chips, it will almost certainly have a long list of customers, including AI start-ups that may opt for these lower-cost options, major corporations building internal AI systems, and more.
According to Amazon's CEO, if the company's AI chips segment were a stand-alone business, it would have an annual run rate of about $50 billion. Amazon generated $716.9 billion in sales last year, so this would be a drop in the bucket. But this business is also growing incredibly fast, according to Jassy. Within a few years, it may generate well over $100 billion in annual sales. And considering the AI tailwind is far from over, Amazon might ride this tailwind over the next decade. So, if Amazon does start selling its Trainium chips, it could be a great move for the company.
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Multiple reasons to buy the stock Amazon's increased reliance on its internally developed chips could eventually help boost margins in its cloud computing segment, whose sales continue to grow rapidly. In the first quarter, AWS (Amazon Web Services) revenue rose 28% year over year to $37.6 billion. The segment's sales growth accelerated meaningfully quarter over quarter. Amazon remains the leader in cloud computing and still has a vast addressable market in that niche, as well as a strong competitive edge thanks to switching costs. Meanwhile, other aspects of the business are performing well, too. Amazon's advertising unit, which carries even higher margins than its cloud computing business, is growing at a good clip, too. It posted a revenue of $17.2 billion in the first period, up 24% year over year.
Amazon is improving its ad business thanks to agentic AI. The company is also turning to technology to boost margins in its e-commerce operations, notably through AI-powered robots. We can also mention Amazon's strong position in video and music streaming, as well as its large Prime member ecosystem, which provides a recurring source of revenue and potential monetization opportunities. The bottom line is that Amazon has a vast, diversified business that should perform well over the long run. The company's decision to sell its Trainium chips is just one more reason to buy the stock.
In the latest close session, Amazon (AMZN - Free Report) was down 3.1% at $227.01. This change lagged the S&P 500's 0.01% loss on the day. Meanwhile, the Dow experienced a rise of 0.14%, and the technology-dominated Nasdaq saw a decrease of 0.46%.
Shares of the online retailer witnessed a loss of 13.82% over the previous month, trailing the performance of the Retail-Wholesale sector with its loss of 5.64%, and the S&P 500's loss of 1.4%.
The investment community will be closely monitoring the performance of Amazon in its forthcoming earnings report. On that day, Amazon is projected to report earnings of $1.82 per share, which would represent year-over-year growth of 8.33%. In the meantime, our current consensus estimate forecasts the revenue to be $196.87 billion, indicating a 17.39% growth compared to the corresponding quarter of the prior year.
For the full year, the Zacks Consensus Estimates are projecting earnings of $8.85 per share and revenue of $826.69 billion, which would represent changes of +23.43% and +15.31%, respectively, from the prior year.
It is also important to note the recent changes to analyst estimates for Amazon. These revisions typically reflect the latest short-term business trends, which can change frequently. As a result, upbeat changes in estimates indicate analysts' favorable outlook on the business health and profitability.
Based on our research, we believe these estimate revisions are directly related to near-term stock moves. To take advantage of this, we've established the Zacks Rank, an exclusive model that considers these estimated changes and delivers an operational rating system.
The Zacks Rank system, spanning from #1 (Strong Buy) to #5 (Strong Sell), boasts an impressive track record of outperformance, audited externally, with #1 ranked stocks yielding an average annual return of +25% since 1988. Over the past month, there's been no change in the Zacks Consensus EPS estimate. Amazon is holding a Zacks Rank of #3 (Hold) right now.
In the context of valuation, Amazon is at present trading with a Forward P/E ratio of 26.48. This denotes a premium relative to the industry average Forward P/E of 17.36.
It is also worth noting that AMZN currently has a PEG ratio of 1.53. This popular metric is similar to the widely-known P/E ratio, with the difference being that the PEG ratio also takes into account the company's expected earnings growth rate. As of the close of trade yesterday, the Internet - Commerce industry held an average PEG ratio of 1.06.
The Internet - Commerce industry is part of the Retail-Wholesale sector. Currently, this industry holds a Zacks Industry Rank of 104, positioning it in the top 43% of all 250+ industries.
The Zacks Industry Rank evaluates the power of our distinct industry groups by determining the average Zacks Rank of the individual stocks forming the groups. Our research shows that the top 50% rated industries outperform the bottom half by a factor of 2 to 1.
To follow AMZN in the coming trading sessions, be sure to utilize Zacks.com.
The robots glide across the floor, sometimes pausing to spin a quarter turn or two before resuming their route. They come close to one another but never collide. It's not choreographed – they're adapting on the fly – but the movement does have the feel of a ballet.
If ballet dancers were mechanized platforms on wheels, that is. Flat-topped and low to the ground, like oversized bathroom scales granted the gift of movement and the ability to navigate on their own.
These are Amazon's Proteus robots in action.
In a spacious Amazon warehouse in London, as in its counterparts around the world, Proteus, Titan and fellow robots are perpetually tasked with fetch quests – finding and retrieving shelving units that contain items that all of us order day in and day out and bringing them to stations where those items are picked, packed and sent on their way.
Some of those days are busier than others – Prime Day sales, for example, when Amazon orders surge. During these periods, fulfillment centers bring on thousands more workers and the robots keep pace.
We visited two Amazon locations – the LCY3 London fulfillment center and the BOS27 robot development facility in Westborough, Massachusetts – to better understand the role robots play in ensuring our packages reach us at speed, both now and in the future.
After decades of humanity's sci-fi-inspired preoccupation with robots, advances in AI (including large language models and vision language models) over the past five years are increasingly allowing robots to interact with people in more natural ways. For the most part, these real-world robots bear little resemblance to the pop culture depictions, particularly of the humanoid variety. Humanoids are starting to spring up, but most robots around us today are much closer to the type Amazon and other companies are using in industrial settings.
Proteus version two -- coming soon to a fulfillment center near you.
Katie Collins/CNETIn Amazon facilities, the robots range from Proteus, which could be a Roomba's more strapping younger sibling, to Vulcan, a robotic arm with a sense of touch that can pick up objects and understand what it's handling. Altogether, Amazon has over 1 million robots operating in fulfillment centers, handling tasks such as stowing, picking, sorting and transporting.
Even though Amazon has been developing robots for years, it's still only in the early stages of growing its robotics portfolio, said Tye Brady, Amazon's chief technologist, speaking in London in early June.
What it's learned so far is that robots make the environment safer, and therefore more efficient. In centers where robots have been deployed, Amazon has seen a 41% reduction in the number of accidents and a 40% increase in the amount of goods delivered.
"The efficiencies allow us to pass on a low cost to our customers," said Brady. "The robotic systems allow us to store more goods physically closer to our customers as well."
Over time, Brady added, the gradual introduction of robots is creating a powerful cycle within Amazon. "We deploy systems, we learn from them, we improve them and then we expand on what they can do for people," he said.
That's exactly what it's done with Proteus, with a new version ready and raring to replace the existing model in fulfillment centers across the globe in the next few years.
Freewheeling Proteus robot gets language skills Proteus is Amazon's first fully autonomous robot – a "collaborative robot" designed to work and move around in the same spaces as humans going about their normal activities, not cordoned off behind fences with tightly restricted access for employees. It's loaded with sensing and navigation capabilities.
"You just put them where the people are, or put the people where they are, and they'll get right around you," said Travis Hearn, a QA engineer at Amazon's BOS27 facility, located 30 miles west of Boston along a once rural road now lined with low-rise industrial and commercial buildings. Cyclone fencing divvies up sectors of a cavernous space, where a diverse array of mobility and manipulation robots go through their paces.
The more diminutive demo area for Proteus, by contrast, is wide open, simulating the fulfillment center terrain it's built to traverse, potentially several hundred meters from where chutes drop customer packages to where those packages get placed into delivery vehicles.
In a London fulfillment center, an Amazon mobility robot has slid under a rack that it'll lift and tote across the floor.
Katie Collins/CNETA Proteus robot – 7.8 inches tall, 31.5 inches long and 29.9 inches wide – can carry up to almost 900 pounds. That's modest compared to what the larger, lookalike Hercules and Titan mobile robots can carry (1,250 and 2,500 pounds, respectively). Racks holding the goods for delivery get stacked on top, creating tall rectangles that scoot from one station to another.
But Proteus can be much more freewheeling than its fellow bots. It doesn't need markers on the floor to know where it is or what route to follow. It learns its environment over time. It also recognizes when something – or someone – unexpected is in the way.
"You could think of it like an invisible force field, a bubble around the vehicle. So if somebody stepped in the way of the vehicle, then it would come to a safe stop or slow down," Scott Dresser, Amazon's vice president of robotics, said in an interview this week at BOS27. "The intelligence is to find and detect people and safely avoid them."
The first-generation Proteus has been around for several years, and Amazon has a little over 4,000 of them at 25 sites. Earlier this month, the company introduced the Proteus 2, which gains natural language processing so that people will be able to direct it with voice prompts.
"What makes this possible is a new AI architecture that allows employees to interact with Proteus through natural language using advancements in our generative and agentic AI systems," said Brady.
Amazon employees will be able to talk to the robot the same way they do their colleagues, including gesturing – with a casual, "Hey Proteus, could you take this to the corner of the building?" It will be able to figure out route planning and timing and then execute the task on its own.
The second-generation Proteus will be rolled out to Amazon facilities in the coming months.
Robots doing fulfillment work for Amazon orders The new Proteus will be deployed at LCY3 in the first half of 2027. Meanwhile, Amazon robots are already an essential part of the furniture.
Situated in Dartford, right at London's eastern-most point, LCY3 is a strategically located fulfillment center on the banks of the River Thames, serving the British capital and beyond. Here, Prime Day orders are picked, packed and shipped across the UK and Europe.
Last year Amazon invested $60 billion across Europe to grow its operations on the continent, and it has ambitious goals for improving delivery times. It's growing Amazon Now ultra-fast delivery to 20-plus sites in the UK, and it's accelerating same-day delivery by adding more than 25 sites across Europe this year.
"When we make delivery faster, we are not just moving boxes quicker," said Mariangela Marseglia, vice president of Amazon European Stores, speaking at the London event. "We are giving people minutes, hours back."
Faster delivery, she added, comes from working safer and smarter. This is where the robots come in.
Amazon is experimenting with different robotic systems for different tasks.
Katie Collins/CNETTo hit its delivery goals in Europe, Amazon is investing more than $10 billion to expand and modernize its fulfillment network with robotics across the continent over the next few years. Some of the robotics systems it's putting in place have been built on suggestions made by Amazon employees, said Armin Cossman, the company's vice president of operations for Europe.
A new system called Stark, for example, was the idea of an Amazon operations employees in Spain. It picks up huge crates from conveyer belts and places them onto trolleys – repetitive work that puts an enormous amount of strain on the human body. Stark is being piloted in Barcelona, but Amazon plans to bring it to at least 15 more sites across Europe by the end of 2027.
It's the first successful deployment of collaborative robots in Amazon's fulfilment network, said Cossman. "Employees work side by side with collaborative technology – the same space working together on the same process."
On both of our visits to its sites, Amazon was careful to impress upon us that this human-robot collaboration is a key part of its robotics strategy. The company, which has been repeatedly accused of unsafe work conditions in its warehouses and of looking to replace workers with machines, wanted us to know, and you to know, that its robots aren't here to take its workers' jobs – just to make them better.
Amazon's Proteus robots can navigate safely around other robots and humans.
Katie Collins/CNET"When people have a people versus machines mentality, I find that wrong," said Brady. "I believe that people, when they have technologies as a tool set, that there's nothing in this world that they can achieve."
Amazon has upskilled 700,000 workers, he added, with many more to come. He also anticipates the creation of new jobs linked to robotics as Amazon's portfolio evolves.
"Robots create jobs. Full stop. It's a fact," said Paul Miller, vice president and principal analyst at market researcher Forrester. "New jobs are created to maintain the robots, to manage the robots and to do the new work that's made possible because automation has lowered the cost, improved the consistency or accelerated the delivery of the tasks people once performed."
Still, some individuals will be adversely affected by the disruption, Miller added. Those people will need to be supported as they change careers to ensure they're better off.
At LCY3, there were many workers stationed across the 2 million square feet of operating space, spread out across airy halls with natural light flooding in from the Thames-view windows. Many were packing deliveries or unpacking returns, and some were working with and on the robots.
One key role is that of amnesty responder, whose responsibility it is to rescue items that have fallen from the pods the Proteus robots whisk around. Fallen items are the main point of failure in the Proteus system. When something tumbles out of one of the shelving units, the amnesty responder hits a button and the entire ballet pauses to allow the human in the loop to retrieve the offending object. Only once they've exited the arena does the dance continue.
On rare occasions, Amazon acknowledged, a collision occurs. Usually this will result in the Proteus needing a new camera lens, courtesy of the mechanic that's always on hand. Then it's back to work.
What next for Amazon robotics Amazon's robotics capabilities are evolving fast.
Beyond the walls of its fulfillment centers are delivery robots, such as the Amazon Scout and Amazon Prime Air drone. The latter is already live at eight sites across the US. Meanwhile, the company is testing the service in Darlington in the UK.
The MK30 drone can deliver shoebox-sized packages, allowing Amazon to deliver from a range of 60,000 items within a two-hour window. With its six propellors, a redundancy that allows the drone to continue on even if one fails, it will hover above the ground and drop packages without damaging them (it can detect obstacles on the ground).
Amazon Prime Air is another of the company's robotics projects.
Katie Collins/CNETMeanwhile, today's robots are the preliminaries for what comes next. No, not humanoids, like in Elon Musk's fever dreams of swarms of Optimus robots doing factory jobs.
Amazon has more modest expectations, targeting somewhere between what it's doing with robots today and what humanoids may eventually deliver. That could include merging the capabilities of its mobility (e.g. Proteus) and manipulation (e.g. Sparrow) robots. Dresser said Amazon sees paths to using some combination of those technologies.
"How can we move and manipulate in the same robot, and what does that look like? Because we think that that is where our operations are heading," Dresser said. "I think we're going to see some new, interesting form factors in the coming months that are going to be in our warehouses very quickly."
It's clearly a company learning in real time – designing robots to meet its specific needs, and then refining them based on how they perform when thrust into real-world situations. "The systems we're building today," said Brady, "are laying the foundation for what comes next."
While Amazon (AMZN 3.38%) has achieved incredible success with its e-commerce business, forays into brick-and-mortar stores have proven to be a struggle. The company closed its Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh locations this year. So when reports surfaced of a massive 229,000-square-foot superstore in a Chicago suburb, this seemed like Amazon's latest attempt at throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks.
That said, the project is not necessarily a doomed effort this time. Media attention has highlighted the e-commerce giant's attempt to outdo competitor Walmart's superstore concept, which typically runs 179,000 square feet. However, the new big-box retail location may serve a key purpose in helping Amazon cement its supremacy in online sales.
Image source: Amazon.
The advantage of Amazon's new superstore The new store is not just about a bigger emporium to sell more stuff. Part of the space will be dedicated to storing items. In essence, Amazon's new retail concept will also serve as a mini-warehouse.
This is a key element in the design. It gives Amazon a storage location closer to customer homes, providing greater flexibility for its massive logistics operations and enabling speedier shipping. These attributes are desirable because, as Amazon CEO Andy Jassy explains, "Despite many improvements over the years, customers always want lower costs and faster delivery speed."
The ability to accelerate shipping translates into more revenue. According to Jassy, "When we promise faster delivery times, customers complete purchases at a meaningfully higher rate and shop with us more frequently."
To that end, Amazon created a new streamlined warehouse format called Same-Day Fulfillment Centers. These facilities carry the top sellers, with the goal of delivering an item within the day it is ordered.
The company is also experimenting with an ultra-fast delivery service called Amazon Now, which aims to get items to customers within 20 minutes using micro-fulfillment centers. The service is only in select international markets, and in these countries, Amazon Now orders are increasing 25% month over month. Prime members triple their shopping frequency after they start using it.
The company is looking to expand Amazon Now in the U.S. and Europe. The new superstore could be part of this plan, serving as a micro-fulfillment center.
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Other benefits of Amazon's new retail store The company has extended its delivery capabilities to third-party sellers, meaning Amazon's new superstore concept could help them, too. Third-party sellers are a key component of the tech titan's sales growth. They contributed $41.6 billion of Amazon's $181.5 billion in first-quarter sales.
The company also offers shoppers the option to pick up their purchases from retail locations, such as its Whole Foods stores. Sending products to a central place rather than getting them to individual customer homes simplifies shipping for Amazon. The superstore can expand the retailer's pickup spots.
Of course, the new big-box location will generate its own income through product sales. The question is whether it can do so more successfully than the company's previous efforts. If the concept can produce sufficient sales and serve as a hub for faster deliveries, additional superstores are likely to extend into cities across the country. At that point, it can have a meaningful impact on Amazon's financials and potentially its stock price.
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Stock Market Ends Mixed As Techs Struggle Again, But Micron Spreads Good Cheer Late Amazon (AMZN) stock slipped below a closely-watched technical level in Thursday trading, on a day when hyperscale cloud giants Microsoft (MSFT), Alphabet (GOOGL) and Meta Platforms (META) slumped as well. On the stock market today, Amazon stock dropped more than 2% to 228.11 in midday trades. Shares fell below Amazon's 200-day moving average for the first time since April. While…
Reseller agreement brings Claude, powered by Anthropic, to Hexaware's enterprise clients, accelerating the deployment of safe, high-performance AI at scale
, /PRNewswire/ -- Hexaware Technologies (NSE: HEXT), a global provider of IT solutions and services, announced that it has been named an Anthropic Authorized Reseller for Amazon Bedrock, joining a select group of companies worldwide authorized to resell Claude. Under the agreement, Hexaware can sell, integrate, and support Claude models—directly to enterprise clients worldwide—deepening Hexaware's commitment to delivering transformative, responsible AI solutions.
By bringing Claude directly to its clients, Hexaware is reinforcing its AI-first strategy and positioning itself to support the entire AI lifecycle, from model access and customization to implementation and managed services. Developed by Anthropic with a strong focus on safety and reliability, Claude is built for enterprise use. Its advanced AI methodology and context window make it well-suited for complex, high-stakes applications across industries such as financial services, healthcare, transportation, manufacturing, and retail—areas where Hexaware has deep domain expertise and a global delivery presence.
"This authorization reflects the Foundational AI capability that we've built and the trust our clients have placed in us. Claude's safety-first design is what highly regulated industries need—and Hexaware has the domain knowledge, engineering excellence, and delivery scale to take it from a model to a working solution," said Siddharth Dhar, President & Global Head – Digital IT Operations & AI, Hexaware.
What This Means for Hexaware Customers
Hexaware's Anthropic Authorized Reseller for Amazon Bedrock status translates into immediate, tangible advantages for enterprise customers:
Direct access to Claude models: Simplified, enterprise-grade access to Claude models, reducing procurement friction and speeding time-to-value End-to-end AI delivery: Global Hexaware team combining Claude with industry solutions, integration services, and change management, delivering fully operational AI Built-in responsible AI: Anthropic's safety-first models paired with Hexaware's governance for secure deployment in regulated and critical environments Scalable customization: Tailored deployments (RAG, custom prompts, domain tuning) to maximize relevance and performance Unified engagement: Single commercial framework with consolidated billing, SLA-backed support, and clear accountability Faster innovation: Harnessing Hexaware's delivery speed to leverage Anthropic advancements will help clients to stay at the forefront of AI Hexaware's authorized reseller status strengthens its ability to deliver Claude-powered solutions across key use cases, including intelligent document processing, automated compliance, advanced customer service, clinical data summarization, supply chain intelligence, and AI-assisted software engineering.
Hexaware is scaling these Claude-first solutions for clients, prioritizing AI in the software development life cycle (SDLC), private equity transformation, and cybersecurity. The company has also established a dedicated AI center of excellence (CoE) to support its AI strategy, architecture, and implementation across its global delivery network.
About Hexaware
Hexaware is a global technology and business process services company. Every day, Hexawarians wake up with a singular purpose: to create smiles through great people and technology. With offices across the world, we empower enterprises worldwide to realize digital transformation at scale and speed by partnering with them to build, transform, run, and optimize their technology and business processes. Learn more about Hexaware at www.hexaware.com.
Key Takeaways Amazon will invest an additional $13B in India, bringing total planned spending to $48B by 2030.AMZN is expanding AWS capacity, AI services, chips, fulfillment centers and delivery stations.Amazon faces execution and cash flow pressures as Microsoft and Google ramp up India AI investments. Amazon (AMZN - Free Report) has committed an additional $13 billion to expand AI and cloud infrastructure in India, lifting its total planned investment in the country to $48 billion through 2030. The fresh capital, layered on top of the $35 billion pledge made in 2025, will widen AWS data center capacity in Mumbai and Hyderabad, extending access to custom AI chips, managed AI services and developer tools for startups, enterprises and government bodies. Alongside the infrastructure push, Amazon plans to open more than 20 new fulfillment centers and over 100 delivery stations across India this year, with an emphasis on reaching tier 3 and tier 4 cities faster.
The India announcement lands against the backdrop of an aggressive global capital expenditure cycle. In its first-quarter 2026 results, Amazon reported cash capital expenditures of $43.2 billion for the quarter, directed predominantly toward AWS and generative AI capacity, as it works toward a full-year 2026 capex plan of roughly $200 billion. AWS revenues grew 28% year over year to $37.6 billion in the quarter, its fastest pace in several years, while AWS operating income reached $14.2 billion. Management has framed this spending as building durable, long-duration infrastructure to meet sustained customer demand for cloud and AI workloads, a thesis that extends naturally to a high-growth, digitally expanding market like India.
The India commitment carries tangible upside. Amazon's cumulative investment in the country since 2010 will cross $88 billion by 2030, with targets of supporting 3.8 million jobs, $80 billion in cumulative ecommerce exports, and AI access for 15 million small businesses. However, the scale of capital deployment raises familiar questions. Heavy, multi-year infrastructure spending pressures near-term free cash flow before returns materialize, and execution across new data center geographies adds operational complexity. Whether India's AI and cloud demand scales quickly enough to justify the outlay remains the open variable through the back half of the decade.
Microsoft, Google Take Their Own Bets on India's AI BuildoutAmazon's rivals are pursuing the same opportunity at different scales. Microsoft (MSFT - Free Report) has committed $17.5 billion to India's AI and cloud infrastructure between 2026 and 2029, its largest Asia investment, anchored by a new Hyderabad cloud region. Alphabet (GOOGL - Free Report) -owned Google, meanwhile, is investing roughly $15 billion through 2030 to build its first AI hub in India, a gigawatt-scale data center campus in Visakhapatnam developed with local partners. While Amazon's $48 billion outlay is the largest of the three, Microsoft and Google are betting that India's expanding developer base and digital economy justify sustained, multi-year capital commitments of their own, intensifying competition among Amazon, Microsoft and Google for India's cloud and AI workloads.
AMZN’s Share Price Performance, Valuation & EstimatesAmazon shares have returned 0.8% in the past six-month period against the Zacks Internet – Commerce industry and the Zacks Retail-Wholesale sector’s decline of 6.7% and 2.3%, respectively.
AMZN’s 6-Month Price Performance
Image Source: Zacks Investment Research
From a valuation standpoint, AMZN stock appears overvalued, trading at a forward 12-month price/earnings ratio of 24.89X, higher than the industry’s 20.9X. Amazon has a Value Score of D.
AMZN’s Valuation
Image Source: Zacks Investment Research
The Zacks Consensus Estimate for AMZN’s 2026 earnings is pegged at $8.85 per share, indicating a 23.43% increase from the figure reported in the year-ago quarter.
Amazon currently carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.
It took Amazon (AMZN +0.05%) about 27 years as a publicly traded company to reach a market cap of $2 trillion. Space Exploration Technologies (SPCX 0.97%) got to that milestone in about a week. In fact, SpaceX briefly overtook Amazon as the fifth-largest corporation on the market, although as of this writing, the e-commerce specialist is back ahead. Clearly, many investors have incredibly high hopes for SpaceX, but is the aerospace manufacturer a better buy than Amazon? Let's find out.
Image source: The Motley Fool.
SpaceX is shooting for the moon SpaceX may be a newbie on equity markets, but the company is well-known within its industry and has helped revolutionize space travel by pioneering reusable rockets. SpaceX dominates this field. In 2025, it had more successful orbital launches (by a mile) than any of its competitors. That said, SpaceX's most profitable business isn't space travel. That title goes to Starlink, which provides high-speed broadband through a network of Low Earth Orbit satellites.
As of March 31, Starlink had 10.3 million subscribers, up 106% year over year. And last year, SpaceX recorded $11.4 billion in connectivity revenue, which accounted for almost 61% of its top line. It was also the only one of SpaceX's segments that was profitable; it generated an income from operations of about $4.4 billion, more than doubling compared to the year-ago period.
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SpaceX has high hopes for its connectivity business, where it estimates a $1.6 trillion total addressable market that dwarfs its current revenue. Further, the company's two other segments -- space and artificial intelligence (AI) -- could also eventually contribute meaningfully to the bottom line. SpaceX is working on a next-gen, fully reusable rocket that could help it significantly boost profits and margins within its space business. SpaceX is also investing heavily to scale its AI infrastructure business.
The company sees an even larger opportunity in AI, which it estimates at $26.5 trillion. SpaceX may not be consistently profitable, but its innovative qualities, aggressive vision for the future, and large addressable market may allow the stock to deliver life-changing returns over the long run.
Don't underestimate Amazon Amazon has lagged the S&P 500 over the past 12 months, but the company's prospects remain attractive. Though it has helped pioneer industries such as e-commerce and cloud computing, there is still a large addressable market for the tech leader in both, and it has established a wide moat thanks to its brand name, network effects, and switching costs.
Amazon is actively seeking ways to improve profitability, notably by deploying AI-powered robots in its warehouses to boost efficiency and cut costs. E-commerce remains Amazon's largest source of sales, but this business has low margins. That could change over the next decade thanks to the company's ongoing efforts. Amazon's bottom line will also benefit from the company's ramp-up of its high-margin advertising business.
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Further, Amazon is constantly tapping into new growth opportunities. Earlier this year, it announced that it would open up its logistics network to other corporations through a new initiative called Amazon Supply Chain Services (ASCS). The company is also apparently in talks to sell its Trainium custom AI chips. They may not be as versatile as the market-leading GPUs (Graphics Processing Units), but they are highly performant for specific AI workloads and are more cost-effective than comparable GPUs.
That's why this could be a highly successful initiative for Amazon. In short, Amazon generates consistent revenue, earnings, and cash flow, and has attractive long-term growth avenues and a strong competitive edge. All of these factors make the stock a great pick for investors.
If we just focus on both companies' financial results, there is no contest between the two: Amazon is the winner by a wide margin.
SPCX Revenue (Annual) data by YCharts
However, the market is valuing SpaceX at levels similar to Amazon because, if the former's master plan comes to fruition, it will generate incredible returns. But it's important to remember that the company could face significant roadblocks, including mounting competition. SpaceX is also subject to significant regulatory and geopolitical risks given its reliance on government contracts for revenue. Any kink in the company's armor could trigger a sell-off, considering the high expectations the market has already placed on SpaceX.
Those comfortable with the risk and volatility, and who believe that Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX, can successfully steer the company toward its goals, should definitely opt for SpaceX over Amazon. More skeptical investors would be better off picking Amazon. The e-commerce leader has a reliable business that is less risky than SpaceX, and still looks likely to generate outstanding returns over the long term.
Amazon on Thursday said it would invest an additional $13 billion to expand its AI and cloud footprint in India through 2030.
The fresh investment, announced after Amazon CEO Andy Jassy met India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi in New Delhi, will fund the expansion of Amazon Web Services’ data center capacity in Mumbai and Hyderabad.
The announcement marks Amazon’s third major commitment for India in as many years. In 2023, following a meeting between Jassy and Modi, the company said it would invest $15 billion by 2030, including $12.7 billion for Amazon Web Services. It followed that with an over $35 billion commitment in December 2025. The company’s investment commitments in the country now total $48 billion.
Amazon did not detail how the total $48 billion would be deployed across its India businesses. Long-term commitments by technology companies usually include both capital and operating expenditures, rather than only new infrastructure spending.
Amazon’s announcement follows a wave of investments by global technology companies that are betting that India will become a major hub for the computing infrastructure needed to power artificial intelligence products. Microsoft said in December it would invest $17.5 billion in India by 2029, and Google said in October it would spend $15 billion to build an AI hub and data center infrastructure in the country.
India has also attracted billions of dollars in commitments for data center projects from investors including Australia’s AirTrunk, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board’s CPP Investments, and domestic conglomerates Reliance Industries and Adani Group.
New Delhi has sought to attract more investment through policy incentives, including tax exemptions for foreign cloud providers on services sold overseas if those workloads are run from Indian data centers.
Amazon is also investing in its domestic retail and logistics network. The company plans to open more than 20 fulfillment centers, and over 100 last-mile delivery stations this year, and this week it detailed plans to expand its quick-commerce service, Amazon Now, to more than 300 cities and towns in the country.
The expansion comes as Amazon seeks to gain ground in India’s crowded quick commerce market, where it competes with Eternal-owned Blinkit, Swiggy’s Instamart, Zepto, and Walmart-owned Flipkart. Earlier this week, Flipkart said it plans to open 1,500 micro-fulfillment centers across the country by the end of 2026.
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
Jagmeet covers startups, tech policy-related updates, and all other major tech-centric developments from India for TechCrunch. He previously worked as a principal correspondent at NDTV.
You can contact or verify outreach from Jagmeet by emailing [email protected].
The Amazon logo is seen at its newly inaugurated office in Bengaluru, India, February 23, 2026, REUTERS/Priyanshu Singh Purchase Licensing Rights, opens new tab
June 25 (Reuters) - Amazon (AMZN.O), opens new tab said on Thursday it will invest an additional $13 billion by 2030 in India to expand its AI and cloud infrastructure.
The new investment is in addition to its planned $35 billion funding announced last year, taking the e-commerce firm's investment in the country to $48 billion through 2030.
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The announcement follows a meeting between Amazon CEO Andy Jassy and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday in New Delhi.
"Shared that we're investing $48 billion over the coming five years, including $21+ billion in AI and cloud infrastructure," Jassy said in a post on social media platform X.
The $13 billion investment will support AI and cloud infrastructure across the Mumbai and Hyderabad regions, the company said in a statement.
Major U.S. tech firms have invested billions of dollars in India, underscoring the country's emergence as a strategic hub for cloud, AI and deep‑tech growth.
Microsoft (MSFT.O), opens new tab has pledged a $17.5 billion investment in India for AI and cloud infrastructure, while Google (GOOGL.O), opens new tab has committed $15 billion over the next five years to build AI data centers.
Reporting by Abinaya V and Akanksha Khushi in Bengaluru; Editing by Saumyadeb Chakrabarty
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab
An Amazon warehouse employee THOMAS SAMSON/AFP via Getty Images Amazon thinks one of its biggest warehouse efficiency opportunities lies in jobs that generate little operational data. A new wearable-device system could change that.
Internal documents reviewed by Business Insider show Amazon is testing a new program called Right Station Link that uses a wearable device to automatically capture check-in and labor-hours data for "indirect" support roles, such as equipment maintenance, safety coordination, and floor management, that have historically been harder to track.
Unlike warehouse workers at packing stations, employees in indirect roles frequently move between assignments throughout a shift. Amazon expects the new devices to "improve labor tracking accuracy" and "reduce non-productive labor hours," one of the documents stated.
According to one of the internal documents from March, these indirect roles account for roughly $2.8 billion worth of labor spending, or 85 million labor hours. At the time of the analysis, conducted last year, many of those roles lacked the "digital signals" needed to automatically confirm worker presence.
"Right Station Link brings automated labor hour measurement to $2.8B of manually tracked labor spend in one deployment, enabling labor automation for all sortation roles," one of the documents stated.
The initiative is part of Amazon's next warehouse efficiency push. The company spent years streamlining how packages move. Now it's applying the same playbook to people, betting that smarter worker assignments and better labor monitoring can unlock millions of dollars in savings.
Wearable scannersInternal documents show Amazon initially planned to rely on Zebra WS501 wearable scanners. Workers usually wear this scanner on the back of their hand. They get assignments and break notifications through the device, while missed check-ins automatically send alerts to managers, according to the documents.
Before Right Station Link, check-in and assignment data for many indirect roles was not automatically captured by Amazon. Managers instead documented station changes "manually on a digital platform," according to an Amazon spokesperson.
The internal documents show Amazon became concerned that some managers were assigning more workers to indirect roles than staffing models recommended and were relying on manual time edits that made labor allocation harder to track consistently.
Amazon later eliminated manual time editing and required labor hours to be coded through its internal staffing system, which internal analysis suggested improved productivity.
Right Station Link is intended to help indirect workers "adhere to staffing assignments," while reducing "idle time," one document stated.
The Amazon spokesperson told Business Insider that during a pilot test, some managers were more cautious around their staffing needs to ensure they had enough employees to process volume, and they were not trying to "game the system."
Delivery delaysAmazon wants to expand Right Station Link to all North American warehouses before the holiday peak season, according to one of the documents.
However, company leaders warned that Zebra device delivery delays could create "significant risk" to deployment timelines and reduce expected financial benefits, the internal documents show.
To address that, Amazon is making its software compatible with other devices and plans to use existing scanners already deployed throughout its facilities. The company spokesperson said Right Station Link is not dependent on any specific hardware model and expansion plans may change. It's been testing hand-held devices as well as wearables, although employees prefer wearables, according to the spokesperson.
"Right Station Link is being piloted at a small number of sites, and any potential future expansion plans are entirely speculative," Amazon said. "As we test, we're being deliberate about where this technology makes sense, and where it doesn't."
The company said the system does not measure individual productivity or track workers' real-time movements.
"A natural extension"Before publication, the spokesperson told Business Insider that the premise of this story was "inaccurate" because it drew overly broad conclusions from incomplete data.
This spokesperson described Right Station Link as a tool that lets employees check into stations and receive assignment updates, calling it a "natural extension" of existing workforce-management processes.
The $2.8 billion figure does not represent "excess or waste" spending, but a "theoretical modeled opportunity" of a specific category of data that had not yet been integrated into Amazon's staffing platform at the time of the analysis, the spokesperson added.
"Right Station wasn't developed to solve 'visibility' issues in our network — its intent is to streamline one element of our staffing processes through improving on our existing systems," the spokesperson said. "As is industry standard, we digitally track employee hours to ensure we're appropriately staffing our facilities to safely deliver on our customer promises."
Measurement challengesIndirect roles have been difficult for warehouse operators to measure.
Unlike pickers or packers, whose productivity can be tracked through units processed, support functions such as maintenance and training are harder to quantify, according to Steve Tracey, a supply chain management professor at Penn State University. As a result, companies often rely on labor tracking and outcome-based metrics, such as equipment uptime and safety performance, to evaluate those roles, he said.
The Amazon spokesperson disputed suggestions that the company had difficulty capturing this data, saying the information already exists in its systems.
Right Station Link simply gives employees a device for receiving assignments and sending updates throughout the day, the spokesperson added, comparing it to a hotel maintenance worker using a handheld device to receive service requests and notify management when work begins.
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Eugene is Business Insider’s Chief Tech Correspondent, where he leads coverage of Amazon. His reporting spans the company’s retail operations, AWS, Alexa, and its secretive internal work culture.Previously, he worked at CNBC, Fortune Magazine Korea, and Japan's Yomiuri Shimbun. He holds degrees from NYU and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.In 2022, Eugene broke a story uncovering Amazon’s practice of deceptively enrolling customers in Prime and deliberately making cancellation difficult. A year later, the Federal Trade Commission sued the company, citing his reporting. That case culminated in a record $2.5 billion settlement in 2025.His reporting has earned multiple honors, including the SF Press Club’s Bay Area Journalism Award and SPJ NorCal’s Excellence in Journalism Award.Eugene lives in the Bay Area. Contact him via email at [email protected], or Signal, Telegram, or WhatsApp at 650-942-3061. Use a personal email address, a nonwork WiFi network, and a nonwork device; here's our guide to sharing information securely. ExpertiseAmazon, Jeff Bezos, Andy Jassy, e-commerce, and cloud computing.Popular ArticlesAmazon:Internal Amazon emails give an exclusive look at how CEO Andy Jassy has started to run the company, with obsessive attention to the retail business and what some employees feel is micromanagingAndy Jassy will be the next CEO of Amazon. Insiders dish on what it's like to work for Jeff Bezos' successor, who built AWS into a $40 billion business.Internal documents show Amazon has for years knowingly tricked people into signing up for Prime subscriptions. 'We have been deliberately confusing,' former employee says.Inside Amazon's flailing brick-and-mortar ambitions: missed projections, pressure to cut costs, and a war with Whole FoodsInside Amazon's complex employee-review system, where workers feel left in the dark and managers expect to give 5% of reports bad reviewsAfter 28 years, 'Day 2' finally arrives at AmazonAWS, Alexa, healthcare:Inside Amazon's struggle to break into the lucrative market for SaaS business applications, including an internal pitch to buy $38 billion HubSpotInside Amazon's struggle to crack Nvidia's AI-chip dominanceAmazon's AI data center dream runs into the reality of 'zombie' facilities, higher costs, and labor shortagesAmazon is gutting its voice assistant, Alexa. Employees describe a division in crisis and huge losses on 'a wasted opportunity.'Amazon is working on a new 'Remarkable Alexa,' but internal politics and technical issues plague the projectAmazon projected huge losses from its healthcare business in 2024, but strong sales growth, internal document reveals
Amazon automation Exclusive More Wearables eCommerce
Amazon has announced plans to invest an additional $13 billion in India to expand its artificial intelligence and cloud infrastructure, taking its total planned investment in the country to $48 billion between 2026 and 2030.
The fresh commitment builds on the company’s previously announced $35 billion investment across its India businesses in December 2025.
The company said the expansion is aimed at giving startups, enterprises, and government organisations access to custom AI chips, managed AI services, secure cloud technologies, and developer tools.
The announcement comes as Amazon steps up its long-term investment plans in India across cloud, ecommerce, and logistics, while also pushing deeper into AI-led services and infrastructure.
Amazon said the new investment will primarily support AI and cloud expansion in India.
The company plans to increase AWS data centre capacity in Mumbai and Hyderabad as demand rises from businesses, startups, and public sector organisations looking to build and scale AI applications.
The investment reflects Amazon’s broader push into AI infrastructure globally, a strategy Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has also linked to the need to spend aggressively during what he has described as a major technology shift.
Alongside AI and cloud spending, Amazon said it will continue investing in the operations network that supports its e-commerce and quick commerce businesses in India.
The company plans to launch more than 20 new fulfilment centres and over 100 new last-mile delivery stations this year.
It said the expansion is intended to speed up deliveries across the country, particularly in tier 3 and tier 4 cities.
Amazon said its India operations network already serves customers in every pin code in the country.
Amazon also highlighted “Sammaan”, a programme aimed at supporting delivery associates through scholarships for their children, access to government benefits and financial inclusion programmes, insurance coverage, and on-road safety measures.
The company said a portion of its recently announced $300 million investment in operations and associate well-being in India will be directed towards scaling these initiatives.
Amazon said its cumulative investments in India from 2010 to 2030 now stand at more than $88 billion.
According to the company, it has digitised 12 million small businesses in the country, enabled more than $20 billion in cumulative ecommerce exports, supported 2.8 million jobs, and trained over 10 million Indians in cloud skills.
Through 2030, AMZN said it will focus on AI-led digitisation, export growth, and job creation.
The company said it has committed to supporting 3.8 million jobs, enabling $80 billion in cumulative exports, extending AI benefits to 15 million small businesses, and providing AI education to 4 million government school students.
The announcement comes alongside a busy period for Amazon globally and in India.
AMZN this week launched its 12th annual Prime Day event, a four-day shopping campaign spanning more than 35 countries.
The event is significant for the company because it is one of the biggest moments on the retail calendar and offers insight into consumer spending trends.
This year also marks the first time since 2021 that Prime Day is being held in the second quarter.
It is also the first major retail event since Amazon introduced its AI-powered shopping assistant, Alexa for Shopping, in May.
Meanwhile, Amazon recently said it had become water positive in India ahead of its 2027 target.
The company said it now returns more water to communities than it uses across its direct operations in the country, including offices, fulfilment centres, and data centres.
The update comes as major technology companies face increasing scrutiny over the environmental impact of expanding data centre infrastructure, particularly as AI-related investments continue to accelerate.
Amazon plans to invest an additional $13 billion to expand artificial intelligence and cloud infrastructure in India, taking its total investment in the country to $48 billion between 2026 and 2030.
These funds will be used to expand AWS data center capacity in Mumbai and Hyderabad, the company said in a statement on Thursday. In December last year, Amazon had pledged to invest $35 billion, as hyperscalers raced to get a foothold in the Indian market.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said the company is committed to being "a long-term partner in India's growth story" and wants to align with the country's "priorities of democratizing access to AI, digitizing small businesses, creating jobs, and enabling exports."
Jassy met Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday and highlighted the importance to Amazon of India, where the company operates several businesses spanning e-commerce, AI, cloud, and entertainment.
The company said its total investment in India between 2010 and 2030 stands at $88 billion.
Through its data centers, Amazon hopes to provide Indian startups, enterprises, and government organizations with access to custom AI chips, managed AI services, and secure and reliable cloud technologies.
Last December, India secured investment to the tune of $50 billion within 24 hours from U.S. big tech companies such as Amazon and Microsoft. Google, another major hyperscaler, is also investing $15 billion to build data center capacity for a new artificial intelligence hub in southern India.
India does not yet produce cutting-edge chips domestically, nor does it have a frontier-scale foundation model on a par with leading U.S. or Chinese models. However, the data center space in the country is growing rapidly.
To encourage the development of data centers in India, the Indian government has offered long‑term tax breaks to major global hyperscalers.
"India's DC industry is emerging as one of the fastest growing globally," global brokerage Nomura said in a report earlier this month. India's data center capacity has risen to around 1.6GW in 2025 from 350MW in 2019, implying a 29% compounded annual growth versus 20% globally.
Zoox refreshed its robotaxi and said it's prepared to produce up to 100 vehicles a week. Zoox Amazon's Zoox is getting ready to ramp up vehicle production with a newly refreshed robotaxi design as the company seeks to expand its service areas in the US.
Zoox unveiled several tweaks to its purpose-built robotaxi on Wednesday, including changes to the interior color, more ergonomic seats, larger cupholders, a more vivid touchscreen, and two-way audio capabilities designed to improve communication with riders and first responders.
Zoox said it can produce up to 100 of the newly updated robotaxis a week to support its expansion plans for this year, pending regulatory approval.
A spokesperson for Zoox said the regulatory approval refers to a pending petition with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The petition seeks a temporary exemption from some federal safety standards that assume a vehicle has a human driver and traditional driving controls.
The core robotaxi design remains unchanged. Zoox said the updates are designed to make rides feel calmer and more intuitive as it prepares to put more vehicles on the road.
The lighter interior color scheme is meant to reduce "visual distractions" and make it easier for riders to spot items left behind, such as phones or keys, Zoox said.
Zoox updated the interior to include a lighter color scheme, more ergonomic seats, and other adjustments. Zoox "These robotaxis will join the fleet across our markets and become available to riders later this year as they come off the production line," Zoox said.
The company said in its announcement that the updated vehicle is its production-intent robotaxi and will be built at its Hayward, California, factory.
Business Insider previously reported that Zoox's 220,000-square-foot factory can produce more than 10,000 vehicles a year.
A Zoox spokesperson told Business Insider that the company does not need to build 10,000 robotaxis at the moment.
"We are ramping production in a deliberate, phased manner to safely meet the strong consumer demand and regulatory requirements," the spokesperson said.
Zoox provides free robotaxi rides to the public in limited parts of Las Vegas and San Francisco as the company continues to collect rider feedback.
The company said that it plans to expand to Austin and Miami later this year.
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Lloyd Lee You're currently following this author! Want to unfollow? Unsubscribe via the link in your email.
Amazon (AMZN) rose 2.48% intraday on the second day of Prime Day 2026, a four-day event running June 23-26 that industry forecasts project will generate $26.3 b
Amazon.com (AMZN +0.05%), global e-commerce, cloud infrastructure, and digital advertising platform giant, closed at $234.27. The stock edged higher on Prime Day demand, AI shopping activity, and analyst support for a Q2 revenue beat.
Trading volume reached 67.7 million shares, coming in about 47% above its three-month average of 45.9 million shares. Amazon.com IPO'd in 1997 and has grown 239,256% since going public.
How the markets moved todayThe S&P 500 (^GSPC 0.10%) fell 0.10% to 7,358, while Nasdaq Composite (^IXIC 0.43%) declined 0.43% to 25,477. Among global e-commerce, retail, cloud computing, advertising, and logistics peers, Walmart (WMT 0.33%) fell 0.34% to $119, while MercadoLibre (MELI +4.83%) rose 4.79% to $1,659.57, highlighting mixed trading across consumer and platform names.
What this means for investorsAmazon’s Prime Day event has begun, with four days of special deals and enticements to expand the company’s Prime membership base. Prime Day got off to a strong start, according to spending data from Adobe (ADBE 0.41%).
Initial figures show online spending jumped 5.3% on the event’s first day yesterday, year over year, to $8.3 billion. AI-driven spending is one of the reasons boosting activity. Online spending for electronics and appliances hit records while baby products and everyday essentials also showed strength. The event runs until Friday, and analysts will use the data to adjust estimates for Amazon’s second-quarter sales.
That might have some investors wanting to get ahead of any revenue and earnings adjustments. Amazon is also seeing tailwinds from its cloud infrastructure business with a planned $10 billion investment for a large new data center.
Howard Smith has positions in Amazon. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Adobe, Amazon, Corning, MercadoLibre, and Walmart. The Motley Fool recommends the following options: long January 2028 $330 calls on Adobe and short January 2028 $340 calls on Adobe. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
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Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman says AI will create jobs. Noah Berger/Getty Images for Amazon Web Services Doomsday predictions about AI and jobs are massively overblown, according to Amazon chief Matt Garman.
On an episode of the Platformer podcast released on Tuesday, the CEO of Amazon Web Services pushed back on fears that artificial intelligence will decimate large swaths of the workforce.
Instead, Garman said he believes half of white-collar jobs "may change" because of AI, but that doesn't mean they'll be wiped out.
"Wipe out and change are different," Garman said, citing the spreadsheet software Microsoft Excel as an example of a technology that reshaped work rather than eliminated it.
"The key thing is not to look at a still picture of the world and say that job's not going to exist, so I guess those people won't have jobs," said Garman. "New jobs will be created."
AI is already giving rise to new kinds of jobs, he said.
"What I tell people at Amazon is — there are going to be lots of jobs," Garman said, as he stressed the value of entry-level employees despite growing concerns that AI could replace junior workers.
Entry-level employees, he said, are the cheapest to hire, can be taught a company's culture, and are often eager to learn new tools.
"They're some of the very best employees you can possibly have," Garman said.
That's among the reasons why Amazon is hiring more than 11,000 software development engineering interns and early-career software development engineers globally this year, he said.
"They come in with an energy and excitement, a new view on things," Garman said of junior employees. "If you just have the exact same people you've had for the last 15 years, you don't get that energy and excitement and new ideas."
Garman said workers who are willing to learn new skills will continue to have jobs in the AI era, even if those jobs look very different from today.
"I tell all of our employees — If you look at what your job was two years ago, and you look at what your job is going to be in two years, it's going to be vastly different," he said. "You're going to have a job — you're going to have probably a more exciting and interesting job. But you're going to have to be willing to learn."
Garman also suggested that a worker's adaptability may soon matter more than any particular expertise.
"I actually think one of the things we start to look for in employees is not what skill set you have," he said, "but whether you have the ability to learn."
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Natalie Musumeci You're currently following this author! Want to unfollow? Unsubscribe via the link in your email.
Natalie is a senior reporter on Business Insider's Business News team.She was previously on BI's Legal Affairs team where she covered major cases out of state and federal court, as well as bankruptcy. Her coverage often focused on stories at the intersection of law, business, politics and technology. Natalie has covered Donald Trump’s criminal and civil cases, the wave of lawsuits against the second Trump administration, the indictment and criminal trial of Sean “Diddy” Combs, the shooting death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, and the legal battles facing Elon Musk and his companies. Natalie came to Business Insider in June 2021 as a breaking news reporter, focusing on the most interesting angles around the trending news of the day. Natalie largely drove BI’s coverage around the fatal “Rust” shooting involving Alec Baldwin and the disappearance and murder of Gabby Petito.Prior to joining BI, Natalie worked for the New York Post, the New York Daily News, and The Brooklyn Paper. She has an extensive background covering crime and courts. During her more than 12-year journalism career, she did a stint covering the police beat out of the headquarters for the New York Police Department. Natalie, a Brooklyn native, graduated from Brooklyn College in 2012 with a journalism degree. Popular articles
Walmart and Amazon face legal trouble for using a points system to track and fire employees over absences: lawyersCelebrities who partied with Diddy may want to contact their lawyersAn unchecked AI could usher in a new dark ageAt Diddy's A-list 'white parties,' naked women were a staple — but that didn't seem to raise eyebrows at the timeThe illegal maneuvers the rich use to get richerOwner of ship that crashed into Baltimore bridge will likely try to invoke 1851 law used to cap damages after Titanic disaster Amazon AWS AI More Jobs Technology
Amazon's (AMZN +2.69%) annual Prime Day 2026 is underway, running from June 23 to June 26. Some investors may consider purchasing Amazon stock ahead of the event's conclusion and the release of any early sales and engagement stats.
While the multiday shopping promotion always generates considerable buzz, it represents only one piece of a much larger picture for the company.
Image source: Amazon.
What is Prime Day really about? Amazon created Prime Day to stimulate e-commerce activity during the traditionally slower summer period. By offering steep discounts and exclusive deals to Prime members, the company generates increased buying activity during a period of otherwise soft retail demand.
The annual event helps maintain momentum in Amazon's e-commerce segment by reinforcing the benefits of Prime membership -- keeping shoppers engaged with the marketplace even outside of the peak holiday season.
Today's Change
(
2.69
%) $
6.29
Current Price
$
240.40
The real investment thesis for Amazon is AI, not e-commerce In my eyes, the strongest reason to consider investing in Amazon stock lies in its leadership in artificial intelligence (AI), not in online shopping. Through Amazon Web Services (AWS), the company provides critical cloud infrastructure that powers AI applications for countless enterprises. Moreover, the company continues to invest heavily in generative AI tools, machine learning capabilities, robotics, and custom silicon.
These initiatives expand Amazon's total addressable market (TAM) and create new revenue opportunities across cloud services and enterprise solutions. While retail operations remain important, e-commerce is becoming a smaller portion of the overall investment narrative compared with Amazon's AI priorities.
Remember to think long-term and avoid timing the market Attempting to time the purchase of Amazon stock around Prime Day -- or any single event -- is unproductive. Instead, smart investors should evaluate Amazon's diversified business model spanning e-commerce, cloud computing, digital advertising, logistics, entertainment, and AI.
Taken together, investors can better assess Amazon's ability to deliver sustained growth. A patient approach rooted in Amazon's long-term potential offers more reliable upside compared to chasing short-term catalysts.
Amazon's Zoox unveiled the "next evolution" of its toaster-shaped self-driving vehicle on Wednesday, adding more rider-friendly features ahead of a wider U.S. rollout this year.
The company said it's equipping the vehicles with higher-quality touchscreens, more comfortable seats and headrests, and small interior tweaks that will make it easier for passengers to spot forgotten items like keys and phones.
Zoox is also enlarging and relocating the robotaxi's "bidirectional reflectors," which help riders and others such as law enforcement distinguish the vehicle's front from its rear, so that they're easier to spot.
The updates come as Zoox is plotting expansion in additional markets and preparing to charge for rides later this year. The company, which Amazon acquired for $1.3 billion in 2020, is way behind Alphabet's Waymo, the U.S. robotaxi leader.
Waymo recently surpassed 500,000 weekly paid rides across 10 U.S. cities. It also plans to bring commercial service to several new cities this year, including London and Tokyo, the first international markets. By comparison, Zoox said Wednesday it has served more than 500,000 riders since it opened service in Las Vegas last September.
Zoox currently offers free rides in parts of Las Vegas and San Francisco, and it's allowing select users to hail its robotaxis in small areas in Miami and Austin, Texas. It's also testing in six other U.S. cities.
In March, Zoox struck a partnership with Uber to make its robotaxis available through its ride-hailing app in Las Vegas, enabling it to reach a wider potential customer base.
The Zoox robotaxis have been nicknamed "toasters" due to their shape. The vehicles have no steering wheel or pedals, and feature four carriage-style seats that face inward, giving them a shuttle-like atmosphere.
Zoox's biggest hurdle remains launching a paid service. The company is awaiting approval from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to operate as many as 2,500 of its self-driving cars on public roads for commercial purposes.
Zoox's petition is currently under review by NHTSA after public comments closed in early April.
Zoox said Wednesday that the redesigned robotaxi is its "production intent vehicle," and the company expects to introduce the model to its existing fleet later this year.
The company added that it will soon begin large-scale production of its robotaxis at its manufacturing facility in the San Francisco Bay Area that opened last June. The facility will help Zoox grow its robotaxi fleet, eventually producing 10,000 vehicles a year once it's at full scale.
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Zoox has given its custom-built robotaxi a makeover — and not just to make it look sharper. The Amazon-owned company revealed Wednesday a series of upgrades to the comfort and function of its electric, autonomous vehicle based on rider feedback and ahead of what it hopes will be a commercial launch later this year.
The core features of the Zoox robotaxi remain. The cube-like electric, autonomous robotaxi still lacks a steering wheel and other controls. The company kept the moonroof and starry night lights as well as the 40 cameras, radars, lidars, and infrared sensors, which help the robotaxi perceive the environment around it. And the vehicle still drives bidirectionally, has four-wheel steering, and can transport four people at speeds of up to 75 miles per hour.
Instead, Zoox has made a series of design and product tweaks required for a robotaxi that shuttles thousands of riders. At least, that is Zoox’s hope.
Image Credits:Zoox On the inside, Zoox has added more padding and ergonomic curves to both the seats and headrests, and updated the color, material, and finish with a lighter palette of aloe-green seating and stone-grey flooring and trim.
The lighter color palette creates a calmer environment, according to Zoox.
It also provides the kind of contrasting backdrop that makes it easy to spot common objects, like smartphones. Other interior changes include adding fluting on the charging pad to keep phones in place, enlarging the cupholders, and a more visible touchscreen.
Image Credits:Zoox On the outside, Zoox has relocated its bidirectional reflectors for better visibility and added a new speaker and microphone to the door interface as well as two-way audio capabilities. The company said the upgrades will improve communication with riders and other road users, as well as between Zoox Support and first responders.
The idea, according to Chris Stoffel, director of robot industrial design and studio engineering at Zoox, is for a simple elevated interior design that doesn’t demand a rider’s attention like so many of the features found in today’s passenger cars.
“The updates we’ve made to this iteration of our purpose-built robotaxi continue to further distinguish the Zoox experience from anything else available today,” he said in a statement.
Image Credits:Zoox There are practical reasons for the design changes as well.
Last year, Zoox opened a production facility in Hayward, California, where the company expects to one day build 10,000 robotaxis per year. The improvements were made in preparation of volume production, which Zoox says can reach up to 100 vehicles a week.
Zoox still has one major hurdle to pass before it will launch production in earnest — or offer paid rides.
The company has requested a commercial exemption for its robotaxi since its lacks standard controls mandated by federal law. A public comment period has closed and Zoox is awaiting a decision by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which gave the company an exemption in August 2025 to demonstrate its custom-built robotaxis on public roads.
If it receives approval, Zoox will introduce paid rides, the company said.
For now, the company is testing and offering free rides in Austin, Texas; San Francisco; Las Vegas; and Miami, Florida.
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
Kirsten Korosec is a reporter and editor who has covered the future of transportation from EVs and autonomous vehicles to urban air mobility and in-car tech for more than a decade. She is currently the transportation editor at TechCrunch and co-host of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast. She is also co-founder and co-host of the podcast, “The Autonocast.” She previously wrote for Fortune, The Verge, Bloomberg, MIT Technology Review and CBS Interactive.
You can contact or verify outreach from Kirsten by emailing [email protected] or via encrypted message at kkorosec.07 on Signal.
Shares of Amazon.com NASDAQ: AMZN started this week on the back foot, trading down around $230, their lowest level since early April. The stock has been going through a tough patch and is now down more than 16% from the all-time high it hit last month.
Amazon.com Today
$240.00 +5.89 (+2.51%)
As of 12:53 PM Eastern
This is a fair market value price provided by Massive. Learn more.
52-Week Range$196.00▼
$278.56P/E Ratio28.75
Price Target$312.78
What makes the current pullback particularly worrying is the divergence from the rest of the market and the broader tech sector, with much of which has been holding on to most of its recent gains. When a stock starts trading out of sync with its peers, it usually tells you something specific is weighing on it.
Get Amazon.com alerts:
In Amazon's case, that something has just become a lot clearer. It was reported last week that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has drafted a potential complaint against the company, alleging it misled advertisers through hidden ad pricing practices, and the penalty could run into the billions.
This isn’t the first time that Amazon has run afoul of the FTC, and if recent history is anything to go by, investors are right to be worried. The question is how much?
What the FTC Is Actually Looking AtAt the heart of the investigation is whether Amazon properly disclosed the terms and pricing of its advertising auctions, particularly a feature called "reserve pricing" for certain search ads. In simple terms, that's the minimum price an advertiser has to accept before they're able to buy an ad. The argument is that Amazon didn't make these mechanics fully clear, leaving advertisers paying more than they otherwise might have.
It's worth noting that this isn't an entirely new line of inquiry. The FTC's consumer protection unit has been looking into whether both Amazon and Alphabet NASDAQ: GOOGL misled advertisers placing ads on their respective platforms for some time now. What's changed is that the investigation into Amazon has now reportedly progressed to the point where a formal complaint has been drafted, which is a meaningful step up the regulatory ladder, and this is clearly spooking investors.
Amazon Has Been Here BeforeWhat makes this story particularly relevant for Amazon’s investors is the recent history. Just last September, the FTC secured a historic $2.5 billion settlement against Amazon over allegations that it had enrolled millions of consumers in its Prime program without their consent and made it deliberately difficult for them to cancel. A settlement of that scale makes it very clear just what the FTC thinks it can extract when it sets its sights on Amazon.
For the latest investigation, it’s a useful reference point for thinking about the worst-case scenario. If the FTC was able to secure $2.5 billion in penalties and refunds for the Prime enrollment issue, the potential downside from a misleading-advertisers complaint could be similar, or even larger, given the size and complexity of Amazon's advertising business.
Even for a company of Amazon's scale, that would be a significant amount of money, and it’d come at a time when Amazon’s outgoings are already under the microscope.
A Worrying Near-Term SetupFrom that perspective, this update from the FTC couldn't really have come at a worse moment for Amazon's stock. As we've covered recently, the company has been grappling with a free cash flow squeeze from its enormous AI capital expenditure commitments, a high-profile Blue Origin rocket explosion that set back its satellite ambitions, and a broader cooling in sentiment across mega-cap tech. Adding regulatory uncertainty to that pile is the kind of thing that can keep a stock under pressure for longer than the underlying business deserves.
There’s also the risk that while an eventual settlement could come this summer, it could also just as easily turn into a drawn-out legal battle that dominates the headlines for many quarters to come. Neither of those is ideal for shareholders who have been waiting for the stock to find its footing.
The Long-Term Bull Case Hasn't ChangedOverall MarketRank™99th Percentile
Analyst RatingModerate Buy
Upside/Downside29.3% Upside
Short Interest LevelHealthy
Dividend StrengthWeak
News Sentiment0.99 Insider TradingSelling Shares
Proj. Earnings Growth29.96%
See Full Analysis
Still, for those willing to look beyond the next few months, the long-term case for Amazon remains as strong as ever. AWS continues to grow at a remarkable pace and is increasingly central to the AI infrastructure buildout. The advertising business itself, the very thing now under scrutiny, is one of the fastest-growing high-margin revenue streams in the company. The deepening Anthropic relationship and the wave of analyst price targets sitting comfortably above $300 all speak to a long-term picture that an FTC complaint, even a multi-billion-dollar one, doesn't materially change.
The current weakness is uncomfortable, no question, and the near term could get worse before it gets better. But Amazon has a long history of absorbing regulatory blows and compounding value over time. For those willing to pinch their noses in the near term, this weakness could be a gift in the long term.
Should You Invest $1,000 in Amazon.com Right Now?Before you consider Amazon.com, you'll want to hear this.
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Key Takeaways Amazon expanded Bedrock with OpenAI models and managed agents to support enterprise AI deployments.AMZN's Bedrock spending rose 170% sequentially in Q1 2026, serving 125,000 customers.Nearly 80% of Fortune 100 companies are leveraging Bedrock for AI initiatives. Amazon (AMZN - Free Report) continues to build out the Bedrock ecosystem as enterprises move from AI experimentation toward larger-scale deployments. As companies look to integrate generative AI into customer engagement, software development and business operations, Bedrock is positioned as one of the platforms within Amazon Web Services (AWS) supporting this transition.
The company's approach centers on offering enterprises model choice, scalable infrastructure and tools intended to simplify the deployment of AI applications. Additions to Bedrock, including OpenAI models and managed agent capabilities, have strengthened the platform's capacity to support a wider range of enterprise workloads. These additions are intended to help organizations build and deploy AI applications while addressing security, reliability and operational requirements at scale.
Customer adoption trends suggest that enterprise demand is strengthening. Bedrock customer spending increased 170% sequentially in the first quarter of 2026, while token processing volumes during the quarter exceeded the cumulative total from all prior years. The platform is being used by over 125,000 customers, with nearly 80% of Fortune 100 companies leveraging Bedrock. These figures suggest a shift from initial testing toward broader integration into business workflows for at least some enterprise customers.
The growing adoption of Bedrock is expected to have broader implications for AWS. As enterprises scale AI deployments, demand often extends beyond AI models to include compute, storage, databases and analytics services. This creates opportunities for AWS to benefit from both AI-related spending and the expanding consumption of its core cloud offerings. AWS revenues increased 28% year over year to $37.6 billion in the first quarter. As enterprise AI adoption continues to mature, Bedrock's expanding ecosystem is likely to remain an important catalyst for AWS growth and the broader enterprise AI landscape.
AMZN Faces Stiff CompetitionAmazon is competing aggressively with Microsoft (MSFT - Free Report) and Alphabet (GOOGL - Free Report) for enterprise AI workloads. Microsoft has benefited from its close OpenAI relationship, integrating advanced models across Azure AI services and enterprise software offerings. Alphabet has been expanding Gemini and Vertex AI to help enterprises build and deploy AI applications on Google Cloud.
While Microsoft and Alphabet emphasize proprietary model ecosystems, Amazon's Bedrock strategy is centered on offering enterprises access to multiple leading foundation models through a single managed platform. This model choice, combined with AWS' broad cloud infrastructure portfolio, could help Amazon attract organizations seeking flexibility as enterprise AI adoption moves from experimentation to large-scale production deployments.
AMZN’s Share Price Performance, Valuation & EstimatesAmazon shares have jumped 1.4% in the year to date (YTD) period compared with the Zacks Internet – Commerce industry and the Zacks Retail-Wholesale sector’s decline of 6.3% and 2.3%, respectively.
AMZN’s YTD Price Performance
Image Source: Zacks Investment Research
From a valuation standpoint, AMZN stock appears overvalued, trading at a forward 12-month price/earnings ratio of 24.88X, higher than the industry’s 20.71X. Amazon has a Value Score of D.
AMZN’s Valuation
Image Source: Zacks Investment Research
The Zacks Consensus Estimate for AMZN’s 2026 earnings is pegged at $8.85 per share, indicating a 23.43% increase from the figure reported in the year-ago quarter.
Amazon currently carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.
Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN | AMZN Price Prediction) just delivered its fastest AWS growth in 15 quarters, yet shares have pulled back from recent highs. With analyst consensus overwhelmingly bullish, our proprietary model offers a clear read on whether this dip is a gift or a warning.
The 24/7 Wall St. Price Target for Amazon Our 24/7 Wall St. price target for Amazon is $321.47 over the next 12 months, implying 38.09% upside from the recent close of $232.79. The model carries a 90% confidence score, and the recommendation reads buy.
Metric Value Current Price $232.79 24/7 Wall St. Price Target $321.47 Upside 38.09% Recommendation BUY Confidence Level 90% Amazon trades roughly 12% below its 52-week high of $278.56 after a Q1 2026 earnings report that beat EPS estimates by 68.18%. Accelerating AWS growth, expanding operating margins, and a reset stock price give the model an unusually clean entry.
An Earnings Blowout the Market Hasn’t Rewarded AMZN has slipped 5.38% over the past week and 12.59% over the past month, leaving shares up 0.85% year to date and 11.02% over twelve months.
The Q1 2026 release on April 29 showed strong results: revenue of $181.519 billion (16.61% YoY growth), EPS of $2.78 versus $1.653 expected, and operating income up 29.6% to $23.852 billion.
AWS grew 28% to $37.587 billion, and the chips business surpassed a $20 billion run rate. The stock drifted lower partly on retail concerns that the $200 billion 2026 capex plan will weigh on free cash flow, which fell 95% TTM to $1.2 billion.
The Case for $366 and Higher The bull scenario builds on an AWS backlog of $364 billion, which does not yet include the recent Anthropic deal of over $100 billion. CEO Andy Jassy noted “we now have over $225 billion in revenue commitments for Trainium”, with OpenAI committing 2 GW of Trainium capacity starting 2027 and Anthropic up to 5 GW.
Operating margin hit 13.1% in Q1, the highest ever, and advertising crossed $70 billion in TTM revenue. Our bull case projects $366.62 within 12 months, a 57.49% return. Bullish analyst ratings cluster heavily: 47 Buys, 15 Strong Buys, and zero Sells. JP Morgan has an Overweight rating with a price target of $330.
The Risks Worth Watching The bear case starts with capex. The $200 billion 2026 capex plan and a 95% TTM drop in free cash flow to $1.2 billion are precisely what retail communities flag as “multiyear downturn” risk. AWS operating margin compressed slightly to 37.7% versus 39.5% YoY, and net income was boosted by a $16.8 billion non-recurring Anthropic gain.
Bulls counter that this mirrors the original AWS buildout cycle, where heavy investment created the most valuable cloud franchise in tech. Our bear case still lands at $277.95, 19.4% above today’s price.
Amazon Price Prediction 2026-2030 The 24/7 Wall St. price target of $321.47 with 90% confidence points firmly toward buy. The setup looks attractive if you believe AWS can sustain 25%+ growth into 2027 as Trainium and Bedrock commitments convert to revenue.
The case weakens if you expect the $200B capex cycle to compress ROIC for multiple years without proportional revenue. The Q1 earnings report, the $364 billion backlog, and record margin all point in the same direction.
Looking ahead, here is where our model projects Amazon could trade in the coming years, assuming current growth trajectories and a roughly 19.83% annualized base case path hold.
Year 24/7 Wall St. Price Target 2026 $255 2027 $305 2028 $366 2029 $438 2030 $525 These projections assume Amazon converts its AWS backlog into revenue and sustains advertising momentum above 20% growth. Material upside or downside could come from faster AI monetization or a deeper capex digestion cycle.
Shares of Amazon.com NASDAQ: AMZN started this week on the back foot, trading down around $230, their lowest level since early April. The stock has been going through a tough patch and is now down more than 16% from the all-time high it hit last month.
Amazon.com Today
$238.54 +4.43 (+1.89%)
As of 10:24 AM Eastern
This is a fair market value price provided by Massive. Learn more.
52-Week Range$196.00▼
$278.56P/E Ratio28.39
Price Target$312.78
What makes the current pullback particularly worrying is the divergence from the rest of the market and the broader tech sector, with much of which has been holding on to most of its recent gains. When a stock starts trading out of sync with its peers, it usually tells you something specific is weighing on it.
Get Amazon.com alerts:
In Amazon's case, that something has just become a lot clearer. It was reported last week that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has drafted a potential complaint against the company, alleging it misled advertisers through hidden ad pricing practices, and the penalty could run into the billions.
This isn’t the first time that Amazon has run afoul of the FTC, and if recent history is anything to go by, investors are right to be worried. The question is how much?
What the FTC Is Actually Looking AtAt the heart of the investigation is whether Amazon properly disclosed the terms and pricing of its advertising auctions, particularly a feature called "reserve pricing" for certain search ads. In simple terms, that's the minimum price an advertiser has to accept before they're able to buy an ad. The argument is that Amazon didn't make these mechanics fully clear, leaving advertisers paying more than they otherwise might have.
It's worth noting that this isn't an entirely new line of inquiry. The FTC's consumer protection unit has been looking into whether both Amazon and Alphabet NASDAQ: GOOGL misled advertisers placing ads on their respective platforms for some time now. What's changed is that the investigation into Amazon has now reportedly progressed to the point where a formal complaint has been drafted, which is a meaningful step up the regulatory ladder, and this is clearly spooking investors.
Amazon Has Been Here BeforeWhat makes this story particularly relevant for Amazon’s investors is the recent history. Just last September, the FTC secured a historic $2.5 billion settlement against Amazon over allegations that it had enrolled millions of consumers in its Prime program without their consent and made it deliberately difficult for them to cancel. A settlement of that scale makes it very clear just what the FTC thinks it can extract when it sets its sights on Amazon.
For the latest investigation, it’s a useful reference point for thinking about the worst-case scenario. If the FTC was able to secure $2.5 billion in penalties and refunds for the Prime enrollment issue, the potential downside from a misleading-advertisers complaint could be similar, or even larger, given the size and complexity of Amazon's advertising business.
Even for a company of Amazon's scale, that would be a significant amount of money, and it’d come at a time when Amazon’s outgoings are already under the microscope.
A Worrying Near-Term SetupFrom that perspective, this update from the FTC couldn't really have come at a worse moment for Amazon's stock. As we've covered recently, the company has been grappling with a free cash flow squeeze from its enormous AI capital expenditure commitments, a high-profile Blue Origin rocket explosion that set back its satellite ambitions, and a broader cooling in sentiment across mega-cap tech. Adding regulatory uncertainty to that pile is the kind of thing that can keep a stock under pressure for longer than the underlying business deserves.
There’s also the risk that while an eventual settlement could come this summer, it could also just as easily turn into a drawn-out legal battle that dominates the headlines for many quarters to come. Neither of those is ideal for shareholders who have been waiting for the stock to find its footing.
The Long-Term Bull Case Hasn't ChangedOverall MarketRank™99th Percentile
Analyst RatingModerate Buy
Upside/Downside33.6% Upside
Short Interest LevelHealthy
Dividend StrengthWeak
News Sentiment0.99 Insider TradingSelling Shares
Proj. Earnings Growth29.96%
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Still, for those willing to look beyond the next few months, the long-term case for Amazon remains as strong as ever. AWS continues to grow at a remarkable pace and is increasingly central to the AI infrastructure buildout. The advertising business itself, the very thing now under scrutiny, is one of the fastest-growing high-margin revenue streams in the company. The deepening Anthropic relationship and the wave of analyst price targets sitting comfortably above $300 all speak to a long-term picture that an FTC complaint, even a multi-billion-dollar one, doesn't materially change.
The current weakness is uncomfortable, no question, and the near term could get worse before it gets better. But Amazon has a long history of absorbing regulatory blows and compounding value over time. For those willing to pinch their noses in the near term, this weakness could be a gift in the long term.
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AI-related memory chip stocks fell sharply Tuesday after South Korea's benchmark KOSPI index retreated about 10% from a recent record level, prompting broader weakness across semiconductor shares.
Wedbush said the decline was driven in part by steep losses in South Korean chipmakers Samsung Electronics SSNLF and SK Hynix (HXSCL), which each dropped roughly 12% in local trading. SK Hynix came under pressure following a media report indicating the company may slow expansion plans for AI memory production while placing greater focus on conventional DRAM products.
SK Hynix is a key supplier of high-bandwidth memory, a component used in advanced artificial intelligence processors from Nvidia NVDA . Competition in the segment also includes Samsung Electronics and Micron Technology MU , whose shares fell about 8% ahead of its scheduled quarterly earnings report on Wednesday.
Wedbush said the pullback appeared tied to profit-taking after strong gains in South Korean technology shares this year. The firm added that recent checks on AI demand trends continue to indicate healthy enterprise spending.
Among major U.S. technology companies, Alphabet GOOG fell about 2%, while Amazon (AMZN) and Meta (META) each slipped around 1%. Oracle ORCL lost nearly 4%, while Microsoft (MSFT) rose about 1%. Nvidia fell about 3%, Advanced Micro Devices AMD and Qualcomm QCOM each dropped around 6%, and Broadcom AVGO declined nearly 4%.
Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN | AMZN Price Prediction) is a stock worth owning for the next two decades because three high-margin engines, AWS, advertising, and Prime subscriptions, now compound on top of a retail base that has finally turned profitable. Amazon is an infrastructure-grade holding built to outlast tariff headlines, quarterly free cash flow noise, and even its owner.
Pillar One: Durability Anchored in Three Cash Engines Forget the razor-thin margins on the e-commerce storefront. The true forever story rests on AWS, enterprise advertising, and subscription services, and the latest filings show why. AWS generated $37.59 billion in Q1 2026 revenue at a 37.7% operating margin, growing 28% year over year, its fastest pace in 15 quarters, on a $150 billion annualized run rate. Advertising hit $17.24 billion in the quarter and over $70 billion in trailing twelve-month revenue. Subscription services added $13.43 billion, up 15%. AWS controls roughly a third of the global cloud infrastructure market, and an AWS backlog of $364 billion, before the $100 billion-plus Anthropic commitment, gives the cash engine years of pre-sold work.
Pillar Two: Compounding Without a Dividend Amazon pays no dividend, so income-focused retirees should size accordingly. The compounding instead happens through reinvestment at a 24.3% return on equity. Operating cash flow climbed from $38.5 billion in 2019 to a record $139.5 billion in 2025. Evaluated on its price-to-operating-cash-flow multiple, Amazon screens as an underpriced utility for the modern economy. Earnings power is following: Q1 2026 EPS came in at $2.78 versus a $1.653 estimate, the fifth consecutive quarter beating Wall Street’s bar.
Pillar Three: Built to Survive Cycles Forever holdings need balance sheet armor. Amazon ended Q1 2026 with $101.82 billion in cash, $441.91 billion in shareholder equity, a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.37, and interest coverage of 35x. Even in the 2022 trough, when net income flipped to a $2.7 billion loss, the business still produced $46.8 billion in operating cash flow. Prime is a sticky subscription, AWS contracts are multi-year, and ads run through downturns. That mix is what a retiree wants on autopilot.
The Scenario Where It Lags Amazon will underperform during stretches when the market rewards capital returns over reinvestment. Management plans roughly $200 billion in 2026 capital expenditures, and trailing free cash flow has already compressed to $1.2 billion. If dividend-paying mega-caps lead the tape for a year or two, AMZN will lag. That does not change the thesis. As CEO Andy Jassy put it, “We have been through this cycle with the first big AWS growth wave, and we like the results.” Those data centers, chips, and satellites become the next decade’s cash flow.
With 62 analysts at Buy or Strong Buy and a $312.99 consensus target against a $244.39 share price, the near-term setup is fine, but that is not the point. Amazon’s profile fits a long-duration compounder framework.
Amazon is putting Alexa for Shopping at the center of Prime Day, using artificial intelligence (AI) to build personalized deal guides, track prices, recommend products and place orders automatically when items hit a shopper’s target price. The four-day event runs Tuesday to Friday (June 23-26), and the stakes are high.
According to a Monday (June 22) Reuters report, Bank of America expects the event to generate $21.6 billion in sales, up just 5% from 2025—leaving Amazon little room for the technology to underperform.
Amazon moved the event from July and is leaning harder into selling groceries, household goods, travel items and back-to-school purchases. eMarketer expects Amazon to capture more than 60% of sales during the event, according to Reuters, even as Walmart and Target run competing promotions.
Alexa for Shopping changes where the buying decision starts. Instead of asking shoppers to scroll through product pages and compare deals themselves, Amazon can use their shopping history and stated preferences to narrow the options before they reach the cart.
Amazon said in a June 16 post that the tool can build a personalized Prime Day Deals Guide, explain why each item was selected and send alerts when a matching deal appears. Shoppers can also check price history, set a target price and let Alexa complete the purchase when that price is reached. That puts Amazon’s AI inside discovery, comparison and checkout.
PYMNTS Intelligence found that 47% of online shoppers used AI during their latest purchase. ChatGPT’s share as a product research tool rose from 2% to 30% in two years, the data shows. Retailers now have to compete for the recommendation before a shopper reaches a product page.
Prime Day gives Amazon a closed-loop test. The company owns the product data, customer history, pricing, checkout and fulfillment. It can see whether an AI recommendation ends in a purchase.
Amazon Uses Alexa to Squeeze More Spending From Existing Prime Members Prime Day has long helped Amazon add Prime members and train them to spend more often. That membership funnel is getting harder to expand in the United States.
Last year, Amazon added 3.9 million members in the three weeks before Prime Day 2025, down 185,000 from the prior year and about 193,000 below its goal, according to Reuters. However, the company brought in 1.6 million U.S. Prime members during the last year’s event, beating its internal target.
Amazon is also widening the purchases Prime Day is built to capture. The company said in its post that this year’s event includes deals on pantry goods, pet supplies and household products alongside electronics. Those categories can support repeat orders instead of one large purchase.
Prime Day Tests AI Recommendations and Auto-Buy at Scale The commercial case depends on whether the tools work under live retail conditions. Prime Day compresses millions of deals, frequent price changes and time-sensitive buying into a 96-hour window.
The annual event is a stress test for AI-assisted commerce at scale. Millions of shoppers making time-sensitive decisions simultaneously is a real load, and the auto-buy feature concentrates the risk: once a shopper grants permission, the system can charge their default payment method and ship to their address the moment a tracked item hits a target price—no additional confirmation required. For that to work, alerts have to arrive while inventory is still available, and the system has to honor the price and product rules each shopper sets.
The last step carries a higher bar than product discovery. PYMNTS reported last week that consumers are more comfortable using AI for recommendations and comparison shopping than for payments and other final decisions. Shoppers still want more control when software moves from advice to spending.
Amazon’s design keeps several approval levels in place. Shoppers can use Alexa to build a guide, watch a product or authorize an automatic purchase at a set price. Prime Day will put all three uses into the same sales event.
In May, Amazon Web Services announced the AWS Agentic Shopping Assistant, built on the same underlying technology as Alexa for Shopping and designed to let third-party retailers deploy comparable tools on their own sites.
That move reframes what Prime Day is actually testing. If Alexa for Shopping performs—if AI recommendations convert, price alerts trigger purchases and auto-buy runs without errors—Amazon will have a proof of concept it can sell to every retailer that runs on AWS.
The real stakes aren’t based on Prime Day’s success itself. Instead, they hinge on who controls the infrastructure layer of AI-assisted commerce once the event ends.
A report from Placer.ai says that six competing mostly physical retailers could be the names to watch during and after Prime Day, given a rise in physical store visits.
While macroeconomic concerns remain, the report says these six retailers "could reap benefits" from Prime Day.
The thesis revolves around retailers seeing strong physical visit growth and also hosting their own promotional events to compete with Prime Days.
"Consumer sentiment remains under pressure ahead of the early summer promotional events, but foot traffic data suggests that shoppers have not materially pulled back from physical stores," the report says.
Data shows that offline retail foot traffic was up 1.2% year-over-year in April and up 0.3% year-over-year in May.
The WinnersOf the six retailers named in the report, Placer.ai data shows strong visits growth for Target and Costco on a weekly basis over the last several months.
Walmart and Best Buy are next with mixed results and mostly growth.
Rounding out the list are Home Depot and Lowe’s, which have "more volatile foot traffic," according to the report.
Placer.ai says investors and consumers should watch to see which retailers roll out competing Amazon Prime Day offers in the coming weeks, which could suggest they are struggling more than others.
"Retailers already generating traffic momentum appear well positioned to capitalize on the season, while those facing softer visitation trends will be looking to promotions to reaccelerate growth."
Photo by amesteohart via Shutterstock
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Shares of Amazon.com Inc NASDAQ: AMZN are trading under $250 this week, down from nearly $275 at the end of last month.
Amazon.com Today
$238.54 +4.43 (+1.89%)
As of 10:24 AM Eastern
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52-Week Range$196.00▼
$278.56P/E Ratio28.39
Price Target$312.78
The stock has been buffeted by a combination of AI CapEx concerns, a high-profile rocket explosion, and a broader risk-off mood that's weighed on even the strongest names in tech. It's been a frustrating sell-off given the recent all-time highs the stock had been printing.
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But some recent developments deserve more attention than they've been getting. With SpaceX having IPO'd, the entire investment world is fixated on space, and few companies have a more compelling and more overlooked space story than Amazon.
Add in a fresh regulatory tailwind, and the setup starts to look more interesting than the price action would suggest.
The SpaceX IPO Is Changing the ConversationLast week saw SpaceX deliver the largest IPO in history, and the wave of investor interest it's generated has reignited enthusiasm for anything connected to commercial space. But with SpaceX having gone public at a sky-high valuation, many investors are now scrambling to find the next-best thing. That hunt is starting to look a lot like the early days of the AI rally, with money chasing any name that has a credible claim to the theme.
This is where Amazon's positioning, beyond its much-discussed e-commerce and cloud computing arms, suddenly becomes a lot more interesting. The company has been quietly building one of the only credible challengers to SpaceX, and to Starlink in particular, through a project called Amazon Leo. It's the company's low-Earth-orbit satellite broadband network, designed to deliver high-speed internet anywhere in the world, and it's emerged as the most realistic alternative to Starlink's network.
That matters because Starlink already serves more than 12 million paying customers and generates revenue at a scale most investors don't fully appreciate. It's exactly the kind of business Amazon is gunning for, with a multi-billion dollar war chest and the full might of its retail and logistics ecosystem behind it.
A Big Regulatory Win That Few Are Talking AboutMaking Amazon's space play all the more interesting right now is that while SpaceX dominated last week's headlines, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) quietly delivered a significant win for Amazon Leo.
The regulator waived a looming July deadline that would have required Amazon to launch half of its planned constellation by the end of the month. Amazon was nowhere near that figure, and the waiver removes what could have been a serious overhang on the project's authorization.
More importantly, the FCC's reasoning is worth reading carefully. The regulator described Amazon Leo's service as "groundbreaking" in both quality and affordability, and explicitly cited the company's multi-billion-dollar investment and the public interest in supporting a credible competitor to Starlink. That's an unusually strong endorsement from a federal regulator, and it adds significant credibility to the project's prospects.
The Launch Trajectory Is Gathering MomentumThe other piece of the puzzle worth understanding is that Amazon's launch operations are also beginning to find their feet. The company has had a notoriously difficult time getting satellites into orbit at scale, hampered by delays at Blue Origin's New Glenn and ULA's Vulcan, as we covered after the recent New Glenn explosion.
But the broader picture is more constructive than the headlines suggest. Amazon Leo's number of deployed satellites recently surpassed 300 for the first time, which is still just a fraction of the eventual 3,232 it wants to get up there.
To make this happen, earlier this year the company committed to doubling its annual launch rate, and its recent acquisition of Globalstar has further bolstered its scalability.
Why This Matters for the StockFor investors weighing up Amazon at current levels, the SpaceX IPO spotlight is a reminder that Project Leo is one of several major growth stories sitting inside Amazon that the market might have been overlooking. So much of the talk in recent quarters has been about AWS revenue and AI infrastructure. Still, there's now a credible satellite broadband business starting to scale, which could eventually generate billions in recurring revenue. All while the stock trades at one of its lowest valuations in years.
Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN) Price Chart for Wednesday, June, 24, 2026
The bears will rightly point out that Leo is still years away from being a meaningful financial contributor, and the launch delays are real. But for those who couldn't get involved in the SpaceX IPO, or who didn't want to, but still want exposure to the broader space theme, Amazon at $250 isn't a bad option.
Should You Invest $1,000 in Amazon.com Right Now?Before you consider Amazon.com, you'll want to hear this.
MarketBeat keeps track of Wall Street's top-rated and best performing research analysts and the stocks they recommend to their clients on a daily basis. MarketBeat has identified the five stocks that top analysts are quietly whispering to their clients to buy now before the broader market catches on... and Amazon.com wasn't on the list.
While Amazon.com currently has a Moderate Buy rating among analysts, top-rated analysts believe these five stocks are better buys.
View The Five Stocks Here
The AI boom is creating opportunities across semiconductors, cloud computing, enterprise software, infrastructure, cybersecurity, and automation.
Inside this report, you’ll find 10 companies positioned to benefit as artificial intelligence moves from hype to real-world deployment and becomes a core growth driver for corporate America.
Apple (AAPL +0.33%) has been a surprisingly strong stock pick over the past year. It has risen nearly 50%, outperforming many other AI-centric stocks, despite not going all-in on AI like some of its peers. But some of its stock strength may have come from this decision not to go all-in on AI. However, I don't think it's a great stock to continue investing in as several others can easily outperform Apple over the next five years, especially as more computing power comes online.
One of the best cloud stocks to buy right now is Amazon (AMZN +1.55%), and I think it offers a more compelling investment case than Apple. Amazon is only up 12% over the past year compared to Apple's 47%, and it could catch up quickly.
Image source: Getty Images.
AWS is at the start of a major growth cycle Amazon Web Services (AWS) is Amazon's cloud computing platform, and it's the primary reason to own the stock, not the commerce business. AWS accounted for 59% of Amazon's operating profit in Q1, driving the company's overall profitability. It's also the fastest-growing segment at Amazon.
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Demand for cloud computing capacity, specifically AI computing power, is reaching new highs, and Amazon is spending a jaw-dropping $200 billion on capital expenditures this year to meet demand. As this investment brings more computing power online, AWS will be primed for a revenue spike, since Amazon wouldn't be spending so much if there weren't a major return on investment ahead.
Right now, AWS is growing at a 28% clip -- the best mark in nearly four years. That mark will likely accelerate over the next few years as more capacity comes online, easily allowing it to outgrow Apple. This will allow Amazon's stock to outperform Apple's, but there's also another striking reason why Apple isn't as good a buy as Amazon: valuation.
Apple's valuation has frankly gotten out of control. The best way to evaluate a company during a heavy capital expenditure cycle is to use operating cash flow. This strips out one-time costs from capital expenditures as well as other factors like investment gains. From this standpoint, Apple is priced at nearly double Amazon's level.
AAPL Price to CFO Per Share (TTM) data by YCharts
It wasn't always this way, and Amazon is trading at the lower end of its historical range while Apple is trading at the higher end. Furthermore, Apple may be seeing some margin creep as prices for memory and storage have skyrocketed due to AI demand eating up the global supply. If Apple has to raise prices to boost margins, it could backfire, as consumers are already stretched thin and may not be able to afford the increase.
I think all of this adds up to make Amazon a better investment than Apple, and I'm confident it will easily outperform Apple over the next five years.
