A Democratic-socialist policy backed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani could cost New York City households an extra $664 a year, Amazon warned Fox News Digital, as a union-backed push to require delivery companies to directly employ certain workers could drive some delivery operations out of the five boroughs.
"We've made clear to every Council member: we’re not looking to leave New York City and our goal has been — and continues to be — to work collaboratively with them," an Amazon spokesperson told Fox Digital. "Our priority is to continue creating good jobs and supporting our employees in New York City. We're equally committed to the local small business partners who work with us every day to provide fast, reliable delivery for New Yorkers."
Amazon has publicly opposed Intro 0518, known as the Delivery Protection Act, which was introduced by Democratic-socialist City Councilmember Tiffany Cabán and backed by Mamdani. The bill would ban large shipping companies like Amazon from using third-party contractors for last-mile deliveries.
Amazon has publicly opposed Intro 0518-2026, known as the Delivery Protection Act, which was introduced by Democratic socialist New York City Council Member Tiffany Cabán and backed by Mamdani. The bill would require operators of certain last-mile facilities to directly employ workers performing core services, including delivery, while restricting subcontracting for that work.
"Corporations like Amazon build billion-dollar business models by insulating themselves from accountability through a system of exploitative subcontracting," Mayor Mamdani’s office said in a press release.
AMAZON DISRUPTING ITSELF, REBUILDING CUSTOMER SHOPPING EXPERIENCE AROUND A.I. FROM GROUND UP
"Through delivery subcontractors, corporations dictate hiring standards, delivery routes, steep productivity quotas and workplace expectations while denying that the workers making those deliveries are employees," it continued. "The result is a system that leaves workers vulnerable and corporations free to avoid accountability for reckless conditions on city streets."
Amazon delivery service partners' jobs are at risk due to a Mamdani-backed bill that would ban third-party contractors. (Getty Images)
Amazon cited an analysis by consulting firm AKRF, commissioned by the Five Borough Jobs Campaign, that projected the legislation could increase delivery costs for consumers.
"This bill would drive delivery costs up by forcing facilities farther from customers — increasing per-route travel time, fuel, and labor while reducing packages delivered per route — with full relocation modeling a 267% cost increase per package for deliveries currently handled by NYC facilities, service-level declines of 10 to 21%, and an additional $664 in annual delivery costs passed through to every New York City household," the spokesperson told Fox News Digital.
"As written, this legislation would put more than 40 [delivery service partners] and their 5,000-plus employees at risk — while likely resulting in slower, more expensive delivery for millions of New York City customers," they added. "We're evaluating all options to try and limit this impact, including the potential relocation of operations and delivery facilities outside of New York City."
That means moving outside the five boroughs to New Jersey, Long Island or Westchester to avoid city licensing mandates.
"Many of the small business owners in this coalition are minorities and first-generation Americans who beat the odds to become entrepreneurs in New York City," the New York Delivers Coalition — who joins Amazon in opposition of the bill — also told Fox Digital. "We built our businesses from the ground up in our own communities, often starting with ourselves or family members as our first employees. Today, many of us employ more than 100 New Yorkers, including people who have faced barriers to traditional employment and have built careers and financial security through these jobs. Intro 0518 puts all of that — the businesses we built, the jobs we created, and the futures our employees are building — at risk."
"We are small business owners in New York City, and we want the City Council to understand that many last-mile delivery companies are real, independent small businesses that hire from the communities we deliver in. We hire our own W-2 employees, manage our own teams and payroll," the coalition said. "Large corporations like Amazon have the resources to adapt to sweeping new mandates. It’s the independent small businesses they contract with that would be forced to shut down, putting the jobs of over 10,000 local New Yorkers at risk."
Neither the New York City Council, Cabán nor Mayor Mamdani’s office immediately returned Fox News Digital’s request for comment.
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"We've invited every member to visit our delivery stations and meet DSPs and their employees," Amazon said. "We hope Councilmember Cabán will do so — we’ve asked her directly — but haven’t gotten a response yet."
"Our message is simple: come see how our businesses actually work. Visit one of our facilities, ride along on a delivery route, and talk directly to our employees about their jobs and what’s at stake," the coalition said. "We want a seat at the table before decisions are made that could put our businesses and employees out of work."
AWS just posted its fastest growth in 18 quarters while Amazon burns through billions in capex, and that tension is exactly what makes the next 12 months so pivotal for shareholders.
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Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN | AMZN Price Prediction) is trading at $266.43 after a 17.55% one-month rally that took the shares through what had been resistance around the prior 52-week high.
Our 24/7 Wall St. price target for Amazon is $338.72 over the next 12 months, implying 27.13% upside from current levels. Our recommendation is buy, and our model registers a high 90% confidence reading behind that call.
24/7 Wall St. Price Target Summary Metric Value Current Price $266.43 24/7 Wall St. Price Target $338.72 Upside 27.13% Recommendation BUY Confidence Level 90% An AWS Reacceleration That Changes the Story Amazon reported Q2 FY2026 revenue of $200.61 billion, up 19.62% year over year, with operating income of $27.46 billion. AWS grew 37% to $42.23 billion at a 39.4% operating margin, the fastest AWS growth in 18 quarters.
CEO Andy Jassy said “AWS is booming, growing 36.7% year-over-year in Q2, our fastest growth in 18 quarters, and our AI and Chips businesses each eclipsed run rates of more than $25 billion.” The stock is up 15.43% year to date and 15.04% over the past year, with the AWS backlog now at $496 billion.
Why Bulls See a Path to $390 Our bull case pins Amazon at $390.72, a 46.65% return. The setup is straightforward: AWS AI and custom-silicon run rates are each above $25 billion and growing triple digits, Anthropic and OpenAI have committed to multi-year, multi-gigawatt Trainium capacity, and Jassy floated the possibility that AWS could become “a trillion dollar annual revenue business for us in time.”
Advertising grew 26% to $19.81 billion, and analyst sentiment skews sharply positive with 16 strong buy and 43 buy ratings.
What Could Go Wrong Our bear case lands at $290.02, still 8.86% above spot. The biggest risk is capital intensity. FY2026 capex is guided to roughly $200 billion, Q2 capex alone hit $54.21 billion, and trailing free cash flow has swung to negative $7.6 billion.
Bulls will note this reflects data-center investments that management says take less than three years to break even and then earn for 30-plus years. GAAP EPS is also flattered by a $53.4 billion Anthropic gain, so headline P/E of 37 understates the underlying multiple.
How Amazon Compares to Microsoft and Alphabet The cleanest comparisons are the other hyperscalers. Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) trades at a P/E of roughly 29 with Azure growing 43% in fiscal Q4 and a $678 billion commercial RPO backlog, richer than AMZN on multiples but with a comparable AI growth story.
Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL) is the value counterweight, at a P/E near 15 with Google Cloud growing 82% last quarter. Against MSFT, our AMZN target looks conservative on growth; against GOOGL, it looks fair given AMZN’s superior segment mix. On balance, the peer set makes $338.72 look reasonable.
Why the Setup Looks Constructive Here The 24/7 Wall St. price target of $338.72 with a buy rating and 90% confidence reflects a clear thesis: AWS reacceleration to 37%, triple-digit AI and chip growth, and a $496 billion backlog outweigh capex-driven free cash flow pressure.
The setup looks constructive if AWS holds above 35% growth into Q4. The thesis weakens if capex creeps materially above $200 billion without matching revenue traction.
Year 24/7 Wall St. Price Target 2026 $291 2027 $341 2028 $406 2029 $452 2030 $505 These projections assume Amazon continues executing on AWS capacity buildouts and monetizing AI workloads.
All of that capacity has to be powered, cooled, and networked by somebody, and we profiled seven of those suppliers in a free report on the AI infrastructure names that aren’t chipmakers. Meaningful upside or downside could come from Trainium adoption beyond Anthropic and OpenAI, or from a demand air pocket that leaves reserved capacity underutilized.
Contact [email protected] for any questions or corrections.
Amazon is turning to AI to help fight scammers, the company announced on Wednesday. The retailer said some 360,000 customers every year reach out to its customer service department, wondering whether a message they received from Amazon is real or a scam. Now, customers will be able to ask Amazon’s consumer AI service, Alexa for Shopping, to help answer that question instead.
The company said its AI can “definitively” confirm whether a communication originated from its own systems by checking it against the billions of messages Amazon has sent globally. The AI analyzes the sender information, content, timing, message metadata, and more, to determine authenticity. Amazon said the system will improve as customers report more suspicious messages, helping it to spot scams more effectively in the future.
The new AI capabilities follow on Amazon’s earlier attempts to address the growing scam problem, which includes fake order confirmations, Prime membership renewal alerts, account suspension warnings, package delivery notifications, and job scams.
Earlier this year, Amazon launched an email address, [email protected], that allows anyone to forward suspicious messages to the company and receive a response that confirms whether the email was a real message or a scam. It also offers an online form on its customer service site that provides the same assistance.
The feature’s addition is aanother example of how Amazon has shifted its product strategy around Alexa to focus more on how it can assist with shopping-related questions and provide proactive help. Today, the assistant can source personalized deals, create shopping guides, help customers reorder their everyday items, offer AI product overviews, transcribe handwritten shopping lists, and more.
On Tuesday, the retailer also added an Alexa feature that lets customers set alerts when something new or relevant happens, like a favorite brand launching a new product, the release of a new book from a favorite author, or an artist dropping a new record.
Alexa for Shopping is available from both the Amazon website and mobile app.
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
Sarah has worked as a reporter for TechCrunch since August 2011. She joined the company after having previously spent over three years at ReadWriteWeb. Prior to her work as a reporter, Sarah worked in I.T. across a number of industries, including banking, retail and software.
You can contact or verify outreach from Sarah by emailing [email protected] or via encrypted message at sarahperez.01 on Signal.
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Amazon is facing a lawsuit from the FTC over its ad auctions. Richard Baker / In Pictures via Getty Images CMOs are digesting an explosive lawsuit filed by the Federal Trade Commission against Amazon this week.
The advice from marketing insiders on the next steps: Check your exposure and double down on independent measurement.
The FTC's lawsuit accuses the retail giant of manipulating ad auctions to artificially inflate ad prices.
Nick Manning, founder of the media consultancy Encyclomedia, said the suit's allegations present another sign to CMOs that "walled gardens and black boxes hold all the cards."
The suit centers on "second-price auctions," which are common across the digital ad landscape. At their most simple: an advertiser sets the maximum price it's willing to pay — say, $1 — but if the next-highest bid is only $0.50, the advertiser would end up paying around $0.51. These auctions grew in popularity because advertisers could bid high to boost their chances of winning an auction without necessarily forking out the entire sum.
DoorDash CMO Kofi Amoo-Gottfried shares how the company is expanding as an advertising platform
The FTC, which was joined in its suit by 22 states, alleges that Amazon sometimes secretly used a "soft reserve" — effectively inserting its own synthetic bid into the mix — to raise the final auction price without advertisers knowing. The complaint alleges that this scheme likely extracted more than $20 billion from advertisers since it began in late 2018.
On Monday, Amazon posted a lengthy response to the suit, which it described as "misguided." It said the FTC's argument leans "on a handful of simplified communications to allege a companywide effort to deceive," which it said was "patently false." The company said its ranking formula gives more weight to ad relevancy over bid amount, and that it properly explains its pricing and auctions to advertisers, such as on its Amazon Ads help pages.
So what action, if any, should CMOs take?
Ruben Schreurs, CEO of marketing consultancy Ebiquity, said he's guiding clients to "remain calm and pragmatic" over what are, at present, just allegations.
Ebiquity recommends that CMOs, through their media teams or agencies, investigate how much they spent on the ad products detailed in the suit over the period it references.
Schreurs advised CMOs to obtain a statement directly from Amazon that unequivocally confirms that none of their spending was exposed to the alleged issues. That can be useful if they want to pursue a claim later down the line.
Alan Chapell, a privacy attorney and regulatory analyst, said advertisers should already be investing in alternative ways to check the efficacy of their ad spending on big platforms like Amazon.
"This demonstrates that, if anything, they need to double down on that component," Chapell told me.
We've been here beforeBig Tech giants have faced several high-profile lawsuits over alleged manipulations of their ad systems in recent years. However, repeated transparency scandals haven't dented ad spending, as CMOs grow ever more reliant on the largest platforms that provide vast audiences, targeting, and measurement tools.
That's no excuse for CMOs to take their eyes off the ball, though.
"Price setting" is key, Encyclomedia's Manning said.
"You have to decide whether the price you're paying on something like Amazon, Google, or Meta meets your requirements, even if there's an uncontrollable and untransparent margin for the platform in there," Manning told me. "You just have to use your own metrics and your own systems."
Amazon, in its statement, said the FTC's claim "fundamentally misunderstands how advertisers operate," arguing that marketers adjust their bids based on performance rather than auction mechanics. The company estimated that advertisers saved more than $8 billion between 2021 and 2025 because it prioritizes "ad relevancy" over selecting ads on bid price alone. It said that with this approach, approximately "92% of selected Sponsored Products ads" in 2024 were not the highest bid, "often by a wide margin."
The point about performance is why Luke Stillman, of the consulting firm Madison and Wall, doesn't think Amazon's ad business will take a major hit as a result of this suit.
Advertisers decide where to spend "based on whether the advertising works and the return they're getting from their campaigns," Stillman wrote. "That is more true in commerce media than in any other channel."
Stillman added that if Amazon were forced to change its auction dynamics, it could cause ad prices to fall in the short term, benefiting advertisers. That could also help Amazon in the long term: If marketers find it more efficient, they'll allocate more budget to the platform.
The lawsuit's allegations will likely reignite existing tensions in the advertiser-Amazon relationship. In April, Million Dollar Sellers, a community of more than 700 Amazon sellers, arranged a 24-hour boycott of Amazon's ad platform to protest several policy changes that the group's cofounder called "cash extraction."
"These allegations, if established as true and systematic, would add to the grievances," Jamie MacEwan, an analyst at Enders Analysis, told me.
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Lara O'Reilly You're currently following this author! Want to unfollow? Unsubscribe via the link in your email.
Lara O'Reilly is the anchor of the CMO Insider newsletter.She is a chief correspondent who has covered the digital advertising, marketing, and media industries since 2010. Her current beat includes big tech companies like Alphabet and Meta, adtech firms, agencies, publishers, the creator economy, and CMOs.Lara has previously worked as a reporter and executive producer at titles including The Wall Street Journal, Digiday, Yahoo Finance, and Marketing Week. She was previously Business Insider's senior global advertising editor from 2014 to 2017.Lara is a regular guest on TV and radio and has appeared on outlets such as the BBC, NPR, SiriusXM's Wharton Business Daily, and CTV Television Network. She also frequently speaks on stage at major events such as Web Summit, IFA, VivaTech, Advertising Week, and Cannes Lions.To get in touch with Lara O'Reilly, email [email protected] or contact her on Signal at @loreilly.71
Investiční boom, který s sebou v posledních letech přinesla umělá inteligence, je historicky bezprecedentní, tvrdí známá poradenská společnost PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC). Ta ve své nové studii uvádí, že globální výdaje na výstavbu a vybavení datových center by mohly do roku 2050 dosáhnout astronomických 31,6 bilionu dolarů.
V případě rychlejšího než očekávaného nástupu AI se objem investic může dokonce vyšplhat až k 50 bilionům dolarů. Pro srovnání, současný hrubý domácí produkt Spojených států se pohybuje okolo 30 bilionů dolarů, podotkla agentura Bloomberg.
Rostoucí využívání AI ze strany firem, státní správy i běžných spotřebitelů vede k masivní expanzi výpočetních kapacit po celém světě. Vedle technologických gigantů, jako jsou Microsoft nebo Amazon, investují do nových zařízení i specializovaní provozovatelé datových center. Největší část kapitálových výdajů přitom nesměřuje do samotných budov, ale do technologií uvnitř center, zejména do výkonných čipů a serverů, kde má dominantní pozici Nvidia.
Rozmach odvětví však naráží také na rostoucí odpor veřejnosti. Jen během letošního prvního čtvrtletí došlo k zablokování nebo odložení nejméně 75 projektů v souhrnné hodnotě zhruba 130 miliard dolarů, vychází z dat Data Center Watch. Odpůrci datacenter upozorňují především na vysokou spotřebu energie a vody, dopady na životní prostředí či širší společenské důsledky spojené s rozvojem AI, píše Bloomberg.
Největší podíl budoucích investic by měly získat Spojené státy, kam má podle základního scénáře PwC směřovat přibližně 15,1 bilionu dolarů. Region Asie a Tichomoří by měl absorbovat kolem 8,2 bilionu dolarů, Evropa 5,6 bilionu, Blízký východ 1,1 bilionu a Afrika zhruba 255 miliard dolarů.
Autoři ve své studii konstatují, že rozsah očekávaných investic do AI převyšuje i tak zásadní technologické a infrastrukturní projekty, jakými byly rozvoj železnic, elektrifikace nebo budování internetu. A zatímco například budování optických sítí nebo výrobních kapacit pro paměťové čipy vyžadovalo vysoké počáteční investice, tak datová centra budou potřebovat pravidelnou obměnu hardwaru. Servery, úložiště, síťové prvky i grafické procesory tedy budou muset být modernizovány v pravidelných intervalech, což vytváří dlouhodobou poptávku po kapitálu.
Na roční bázi globální investice do datových center vzrostou z přibližně 800 miliard dolarů v letošním roce na 1,1 bilionu dolarů v roce 2030, odhaduje PwC, přičemž do roku 2050 by pak mohly investice činit až 1,8 bilionu dolarů ročně. Významným zdrojem nového růstu mají být zejména Čína a Indie, kde kombinace rozsáhlé populace, rozvíjející se digitální ekonomiky a zatím nižší míry nasazení AI vytváří prostor pro rychlou expanzi.
Analýzu kapitálových výdajů zahrnující 46 zemí a teritorií v pěti světových regionech vypracovala pro PwC společnost Oxford Economics.
Klíčem jsou energie
I když je globální poptávka silná, faktory jako dostupnost energie, požadavky na datovou suverenitu a mezinárodní obchod s polovodiči určí, které regiony investice získají, uvedla PwC. Hlavní roli sehrají energie, které rozhodnou, kde se investice do infrastruktury umělé inteligence uskuteční. Velká část prognózy totiž závisí na tom, jak rychle lze zajistit spolehlivé dodávky elektřiny pro datová centra. Cenově dostupná, spolehlivá a stále více nízkouhlíková elektřina ve velkém měřítku je pro mnoho trhů nejnáročnějším požadavkem, který je potřeba splnit.
Výhled PwC zároveň předpokládá relativně otevřený globální obchod, zejména pokud jde o dodávky polovodičů. Významnější narušení dodavatelských řetězců by podle autorů mohlo celkový objem investic snížit téměř o pětinu. Naopak rostoucí důraz států na datovou a technologickou suverenitu by investice spíše přesměroval mezi jednotlivé regiony, nikoliv zásadně omezil.
„Otázkou za 31,6 bilionu dolarů není, zda kapitál existuje. Existuje. Otázkou také není, zda je poptávka skutečná. Je. Otázkou je, které regiony, operátoři a instituce jsou schopny ji zachytit a které ne,“ dodali autoři studie.
The share price of Amazon (AMZN -1.87%) has nearly doubled over the past three years, but is only up about 12% year to date at the time of writing -- performing roughly in line with the S&P 500.
However, the company's year-to-date performance doesn't reflect its surging cash flow and growth in cloud services. This disconnect suggests now might be a good time to buy shares.
Image source: The Motley Fool.
Amazon's trailing-12-month cash from operations surged to $161 billion in the second quarter. That has been growing faster than the share price, pushing the stock's price-to-cash flow multiple down to about 17.
Amazon stock traded at a 25x cash flow multiple, or higher, before the 2022 bear market. It hasn't returned to those higher cash-flow multiples, despite cash from operations increasing by 245% over that period, driven by lower costs from warehouse automation as well as growth in its cloud computing business.
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Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the company's largest profit contributor, and its revenue is accelerating in 2026. AWS revenue climbed 37% year over year in the second quarter (excluding currency changes).
Further growth from AWS should translate into higher cash flow over time. Customers already run massive amounts of data and applications on AWS, making Amazon a key beneficiary as demand for AI cloud services grows.
With the core e-commerce business also accelerating, up 15% year over year in Q2, I believe now is a good time to buy Amazon stock. Investors are getting better value for the shares just as Amazon is seeing accelerating demand in its two largest businesses -- online retail and cloud computing.
John Ballard has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Costco Wholesale. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
For the better part of the last four years, artificial intelligence (AI) has been the wind in Wall Street's sails. But make no mistake about it, the "Magnificent Seven" have put the stock market's major indexes on their proverbial backs and lifted them to new heights.
The Magnificent Seven consist of:
Nvidia (NVDA -1.51%) Apple (AAPL +2.61%) Alphabet (GOOGL -1.28%)(GOOG -1.01%) Microsoft (MSFT -1.24%) Amazon (AMZN -1.87%) Meta Platforms (META +1.08%) Tesla (TSLA -3.22%). Although all seven companies are industry leaders with clear competitive advantages, their outlooks can differ greatly. Arguably, the best differentiating factor among the Magnificent Seven is their cash flow.
Image source: Getty Images.
Ranking the Magnificent Seven by the forward-year cash flow The traditional price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio is the usual go-to when valuing a public company or the broader market. However, the P/E ratio often isn't the best valuation measure when dealing with growth stocks.
Since all seven members of the Magnificent Seven aggressively reinvest their cash flow into high-growth initiatives, including AI, it makes for the ideal valuation metric.
Based on Wall Street's consensus cash-flow-per-share estimates for the forward year, here's how the Magnificent Seven rank from most (i.e., cheapest) to least attractive:
Meta Platforms: 9 times estimated forward-year cash flow Amazon: 11.2 Microsoft: 15.1 Alphabet: 15.9 Nvidia: 16 Apple: 28.2 Tesla: 76 At one end of the spectrum, iPhone maker Apple and electric-vehicle kingpin Tesla stand out for all the wrong reasons. Both are historically pricey based on future cash flow and appear to offer limited upside.
However, social media titan Meta Platforms and dual-industry leader Amazon are standouts in the opposite direction.
Image source: Getty Images.
Meta and Amazon stand out for all the right reasons As has been the case for quite some time, Mark Zuckerberg's company is the cheapest Magnificent Seven stock relative to its future cash flow. Although there's been some concern about Meta's aggressive spending on its data center build-out, it has the steady cash flow of its social media assets to fall back on.
Meta's family of apps attracted an average of 3.6 billion daily users in June. With no other social media platforms close to this figure, it's no surprise that Zuckerberg's company sports exceptional ad pricing power.
3.6 Billion people use a Meta Platforms $META owned product every day
There is currently estimated to be around 8.3 Billion people on Earth
That means roughly 43.4% of the world's population uses Facebook, Instagram, and/or WhatsApp every single day pic.twitter.com/0NyPbCAKto
-- Evan (@StockMKTNewz) July 29, 2026 However, Meta is getting an early boost from AI through its advertising platform. Generative AI is allowing Meta's clients to tailor static and video messages for individual users, which can improve click-through rates and further strengthen Meta's ad pricing power.
Meanwhile, Amazon leads in two separate categories. Most investors are familiar with its dominance in online retail sales, but they might not realize how much annual sales are generated by the world's leading cloud infrastructure services platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Amazon Web Services $AMZN is now a $168.8 Billion Revenue Run Rate business
AWS grew by 36.8% during the quarter its fastest growth since pic.twitter.com/va66AGGbfg
-- Evan (@StockMKTNewz) July 30, 2026 As of the June-ended quarter, AWS is pacing nearly $169 billion in annual run rate sales. This segment generates considerably higher margins than its online marketplace and is responsible for the lion's share of Amazon's operating income. Since Amazon integrated generative AI and large language model capabilities into AWS, year-over-year sales growth has reaccelerated.
As AWS grows into a larger piece of Amazon's revenue pie, the company's cash flow per share can expand at an even quicker pace.
Sean Williams has positions in Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta Platforms. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
FTC alleges at least $20 billion in advertiser harm Summary
Twenty-two states joined the lawsuitAmazon generated $68.6 billion in ad sales in 2025
Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN, Financials), the e-commerce and cloud giant, is facing a new legal challenge aimed directly at one of its fastest-growing businesses. The Federal Trade Commission and 22 U.S. states sued Amazon, saying the corporation secretly inflated minimum prices in advertising auctions, costing advertisers at least $20 billion.
The FTC claimed it might seek billions of dollars in damages. Amazon is accused of participating in as many as 80 per cent of sponsored-product auctions, sometimes placing its own bids and concealing those acts from sponsors, according to the complaint. Amazon has denied wrongdoing.
The company said average advertising cost per click was unchanged from 2019 through 2024 and that it saved marketers around $8 billion between 2021 and 2025. The significance of the litigation for investors is in where it lands.
Amazon's advertising unit brought in $68.6 billion in revenues in 2025, a 22% increase, and ad revenue in the second quarter climbed 26% to $19.8 billion. That makes advertising a more crucial growth and profit driver, alongside Amazon Web Services.
Now the complaint is applying regulatory pressure to the auction mechanics driving sponsored products, brand marketing and display advertising.
Shares of Amazon sank roughly 2.5% . The question for investors now is whether the case ends with a financial penalty, or compels a change in the advertising methods that sustain one of Amazon's major growth companies.
Disclosures I/we have no positions in any stocks mentioned, and have no plans to buy any new positions in the stocks mentioned within the next 72 hours.
James Czerniawski takes a closer look into the FTC lawsuit against Amazon (AMZN) filed by the agency and 22 U.S. states. The suit alleges that Amazon made $20 billion off deceptive advertising practices.
Amazon (AMZN -2.20%) is one of those rare, invincible companies that has grown into a true behemoth, and I just don't see it going anywhere. Sure, the stock will have its ups and downs as the market moves and earnings come and go, but I believe the business itself is here to stay.
Amazon has never paid a dividend and continues to issue shares to employees, but that doesn't bother me. My plan is to buy Amazon and hold it for the rest of my life. And honestly, the reason has very little to do with the balance sheet.
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Amazon is no longer a store At some point, Amazon crossed from a website into a reflex. You need something, you order it, and it shows up. There is no comparison shopping, no drive, no wondering whether the store carries it. Prime members worldwide saved nearly $105 billion on fast free delivery in a single year, according to the company, which averages more than $550 per United States household, roughly 4 times the annual fee.
That gap between what you pay and what you get is the moat. JPMorgan puts the value of a Prime membership at nearly $1,430 per year, compared with a $139 price, more than double the $544 estimate from 2016. When a subscription is worth 10 times its cost, canceling stops being a rational option, and the company gains the ability to raise prices without losing customers.
Speed is the product here Amazon spent over $4 billion to triple its rural delivery network, expanding same-day and next-day service to more than 4,000 smaller cities and towns. The build-out goes from 70 rural delivery stations at the end of 2023 to 200, covering more than 13,000 zip codes across 1.2 million square miles, an area the size of Alaska, California, and Texas combined.
Bloomberg found that Amazon now delivers in under 24 hours to 1 in 5 rural households and within 48 hours to 62% of them. In cities, ultra-fast delivery arrives in about 30 minutes on everyday essentials through Amazon Now. Nobody replicates that. Building it required a decade of losses that shareholders funded instead of collecting dividends.
Image source: Getty Images.
Everything else that gets bundled in Prime is no longer just shipping. It is Prime Video, over 100 million songs, unlimited photo storage, ebooks and audiobooks, grocery discounts at Whole Foods and Amazon Fresh, free Grubhub+ worth $120 a year, prescription savings, and Health AI consultations with One Medical providers. Each addition raises the switching cost without raising the price. All this is outside of AWS' success.
Amazon also runs Prime Access at $6.99 per month for income-verified customers and a discounted student tier at $69 per year, which gets people into the habit early and cheaply.
The AI position most people miss While everyone looking into AI watched Nvidia, Amazon locked in something structural. In April, Anthropic committed more than $100 billion over 10 years to AWS technologies, securing up to 5 gigawatts of capacity to train and run Claude on Amazon's custom Trainium silicon. The agreement spans Trainium2 through Trainium4 plus tens of millions of Graviton cores.
Amazon invested $5 billion in Anthropic immediately, with up to $20 billion more tied to milestones, bringing its total to $13 billion. Nearly 1 gigawatt of Trainium2 and Trainium3 capacity comes online by year-end.
Read that structure carefully. Amazon invests in a customer; the customer spends money on Amazon's own chips, and Amazon captures both cloud revenue and silicon margin while reducing its dependence on Nvidia. That is not a bet on AI. That is a toll booth.
Why dilution does not bother me At times, Amazon pays engineers in equity because the alternative is paying them in cash it would rather spend on delivery stations and data centers. Every dollar retained instead of distributed went into rural logistics, custom chips, streaming rights, and grocery infrastructure that competitors now have to fund from scratch.
A dividend would signal that Amazon had run out of things worth building. It has not. Roughly 201 million United States Prime members and more globally are served by a system that keeps getting faster and cheaper. I would rather own that compounding than collect a check from it.
Amazon's Zoox and Alphabet's Waymo on Tuesday separately announced expansions of their driverless ride-hailing operations into new U.S. cities, weeks after Zoox started paid services.
Zoox said it would begin testing in Houston and San Diego, bringing its presence to 12 U.S. locations. It will initially use retrofitted test vehicles for manual mapping and testing before deploying its purpose-built driverless robotaxis.
Its commercial launch has intensified competition with Waymo and Tesla as companies race to scale autonomous ride-hailing in the U.S.
Waymo, meanwhile, said it would begin welcoming its first public riders in Denver, San Diego and Tampa, bringing its fully autonomous ride service to 14 cities. The company said it would gradually expand access to riders in the three cities.
Zoox has been carrying passengers for free in Las Vegas, San Francisco, Austin and Miami as part of its testing program, before it started offering paid rides in Las Vegas in August.
Waymo already operates paid driverless services in multiple U.S. cities and is also expanding overseas. The company said last month it would begin testing in Munich ahead of a planned commercial launch in Germany toward the end of 2027.
The FTC and 22 U.S. states have filed a lawsuit against Amazon (AMZN) over allegedly manipulating advertising auctions and scalping more than $20 billion from over a million advertisers. Marley Kayden explains what makes the suit so significant for the Mag 7 firm just after Meta Platforms (META) settled its child safety trial.
Amazon continues to experiment with how AI can be used to improve the shopping experience, resulting in Tuesday’s launch of a new feature within its Alexa for Shopping AI assistant called “Update Me When.” This latest addition can send consumers personalized notifications when something new or relevant happens that could lead to a purchase.
For instance, Amazon suggests people could use the feature to track when a favorite brand launches a new product line, when a new season of a favorite TV show drops, when an artist they like announces a concert tour, when an author they read releases a new book, when a tech company releases a new product, and more.
The launch is one of several AI-powered shopping features that Amazon highlighted on Tuesday, many of which point to a broader shift in the company’s AI strategy. Historically, Alexa has mainly answered product questions when shoppers ask directly. Now it can help anticipate when something might prompt a user to make a purchase — before the shopper even thinks to ask.
While initially, consumers have to configure these alerts directly, it’s not hard to imagine a future where Amazon automatically generates alerts or may suggest alerts for shoppers to subscribe to as they browse favorite products.
Among the other Alexa for Shopping features, the most useful of these is the existing price-tracking feature that lets you ask the assistant to alert you when a product reaches a particular price or a certain discount percentage. The feature can even automatically buy the item for you if it meets these conditions, if you prefer.
The retailer has also been using Alexa to source personalized deals and create shopping guides, build carts with items from past purchases, track a product’s pricing history, and see AI overviews when searching for products or on the product detail pages, transcribe handwritten lists to add items to a cart, compare items, and more.
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Sarah has worked as a reporter for TechCrunch since August 2011. She joined the company after having previously spent over three years at ReadWriteWeb. Prior to her work as a reporter, Sarah worked in I.T. across a number of industries, including banking, retail and software.
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Key Takeaways Amazon's Saudi region cloud infrastructure is on track for a December 2026 launch, expanding AWS' footprint.AWS and HUMAIN plan up to 50 megawatts of AI capacity by 2028 using Trainium and NVIDIA infrastructure.AWS sales rose 37% in Q2 2026, while operating margin reached roughly 39%. Amazon's (AMZN - Free Report) $5.3B Saudi Arabia bet is generating fresh buzz on Wall Street this week, as AWS confirmed that its first cloud infrastructure region in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is on track for launch by December 2026. The announcement, made at the LEAP conference in Riyadh, reaffirms a multibillion-dollar commitment first unveiled in March 2024 and adds fresh momentum to a stock that has already been rewarding shareholders through 2026.
Amazon shares have returned 10.6% in the year-to-date period, comfortably outpacing the Zacks Internet – Commerce industry and the Zacks Retail-Wholesale sector, which have gained 5% and 1.3%, respectively, over the same span. With sovereign cloud demand accelerating and AWS deepening its footprint across the Middle East, the fresh Saudi news gives investors another fundamental reason to keep AMZN on their near-term buy list.
AMZN’s YTD Price Performance
Image Source: Zacks Investment Research
AI Infrastructure Push Strengthens the Growth StoryThe new Saudi Arabia region will expand AWS Global Infrastructure to 40 regions worldwide and arrives alongside an expanded strategic collaboration with HUMAIN, the Public Investment Fund-owned AI company. Together, AWS and HUMAIN plan to deliver up to 50 megawatts of capacity in Saudi Arabia's first dedicated AI Zone by 2028, powered by AWS' custom Trainium chips alongside the latest NVIDIA AI infrastructure for training and inference workloads.
HUMAIN's Arabic-language model, ALLaM, will soon become available through Amazon Bedrock, broadening Amazon's generative AI catalog for enterprise customers across the Gulf region, while HUMAIN Fabric will be offered through AWS Marketplace, deepening the two companies' platform-level integration. All AWS regions remain sovereign-by-design under the AWS Digital Sovereignty Pledge, a feature that should appeal to regulated Saudi institutions weighing where to run sensitive workloads.
This buildout is one piece of a broader wave of AI announcements from Amazon's own newsroom through July and August 2026. AWS recently expanded its chip and infrastructure partnership with NVIDIA to support next-generation AI workloads, while Anthropic's latest Claude models have been added to Amazon Bedrock, widening the platform's foundation-model lineup for enterprise customers. AWS also committed more than $500 million toward student cloud and AI training worldwide through a new Student Rewards program and pledged $1 billion to embed AI forward-deployed engineers directly with customers, underscoring how deeply artificial intelligence is being woven into AWS' commercial strategy. Beyond Saudi Arabia, AWS' custom silicon business has exceeded a $25 billion annual revenue run rate, reinforcing that Amazon's AI infrastructure investments are broadening well beyond any single region or single partnership, spanning chips, foundation models, and workforce training all at once.
Second-quarter 2026 results, reported in July, showed AWS net sales climbing 37% year over year to a $169 billion annualized run rate, its fastest pace of growth in 18 quarters, with segment operating margin reaching roughly 39%. For the third quarter of 2026, Amazon guided net sales between $197.0 billion and $202.0 billion, representing growth of 9% to 12% over the prior-year period, and operating income between $22.5 billion and $26.5 billion, up from $17.4 billion in the third quarter of 2025. Management also noted that, excluding the Prime Day timing shift between quarters, year-over-year growth would run nearly 400 basis points higher, pointing to underlying demand strength that headline guidance figures do not fully capture.
The Zacks Consensus Estimate for AMZN's 2026 earnings stands at $13.06 per share, indicating an 82.15% increase from the year-ago figure, a sign that profitability is scaling in step with AWS' AI-driven expansion and broader capacity investments across the business, giving investors a clearer earnings runway to weigh against the near-term capital spending required to fund it.
Valuation and Competitive LandscapeFrom a valuation standpoint, AMZN stock appears overvalued, trading at a forward 12-month price/earnings ratio of 22.78X, higher than the industry's 21.55X. The stock carries a Zacks Value Score of D.
Amazon's cloud and AI rivalry with Microsoft (MSFT - Free Report) , Oracle (ORCL - Free Report) and Alphabet (GOOGL - Free Report) remains intense, as Azure, OCI, and Google Cloud each continue rapidly expanding AI-optimized global data center capacity at a sustained, aggressive clip this year. Microsoft leans heavily on its Copilot ecosystem and enterprise software bundling, Oracle emphasizes large AI infrastructure contracts and database integration, while Alphabet leverages its own custom silicon and search-driven distribution to compete for the same enterprise AI workloads Amazon is chasing today.
Even so, investors should look past the premium valuation because AWS' accelerating growth and expanding operating margin justify paying up for a franchise compounding earnings faster than what Microsoft, Oracle, or Alphabet's current multiples would suggest to a hesitant buyer.
AMZN’s Valuation
Image Source: Zacks Investment Research
ConclusionAmazon's expanding Saudi Arabia footprint, broadening AI partnerships, and strong third-quarter guidance collectively point to a company whose fundamentals are strengthening heading into the back half of 2026. With AWS growth accelerating and profitability scaling in tandem, AMZN looks like a sound near-term buy for investors seeking exposure to the next leg of the AI infrastructure buildout. Amazon currently carries a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy). You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.
Capital Investment Services of America Inc. cut its holdings in shares of Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN – Free Report) by 2.3% in the second quarter, according to its most recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The fund owned 126,495 shares of the e-commerce giant’s stock after selling 2,975 shares during the quarter. Amazon.com accounts for about 3.0% of Capital Investment Services of America Inc.’s portfolio, making the stock its 7th largest holding. Capital Investment Services of America Inc.’s holdings in Amazon.com were worth $30,149,000 at the end of the most recent quarter.
Several other institutional investors and hedge funds have also bought and sold shares of the business. Gryphon Financial Partners LLC raised its holdings in Amazon.com by 7.5% in the 1st quarter. Gryphon Financial Partners LLC now owns 73,085 shares of the e-commerce giant’s stock worth $15,221,000 after purchasing an additional 5,125 shares during the period. First Citizens Bank & Trust Co. grew its holdings in Amazon.com by 1.7% in the first quarter. First Citizens Bank & Trust Co. now owns 303,862 shares of the e-commerce giant’s stock valued at $63,285,000 after purchasing an additional 5,104 shares during the period. Narwhal Capital Management increased its position in shares of Amazon.com by 2.3% in the fourth quarter. Narwhal Capital Management now owns 216,606 shares of the e-commerce giant’s stock valued at $49,997,000 after buying an additional 4,854 shares in the last quarter. Arrowstreet Capital Limited Partnership increased its position in shares of Amazon.com by 21.0% in the fourth quarter. Arrowstreet Capital Limited Partnership now owns 24,653,228 shares of the e-commerce giant’s stock valued at $5,690,463,000 after buying an additional 4,275,942 shares in the last quarter. Finally, Blue Chip Partners LLC raised its stake in shares of Amazon.com by 1.8% during the 1st quarter. Blue Chip Partners LLC now owns 147,461 shares of the e-commerce giant’s stock worth $30,712,000 after buying an additional 2,583 shares during the period. 72.20% of the stock is currently owned by institutional investors and hedge funds.
Insider Buying and Selling In other Amazon.com news, CFO Brian T. Olsavsky sold 6,172 shares of the firm’s stock in a transaction that occurred on Friday, August 21st. The shares were sold at an average price of $260.31, for a total value of $1,606,633.32. Following the transaction, the chief financial officer directly owned 109,207 shares of the company’s stock, valued at $28,427,674.17. This trade represents a 5.35% decrease in their position. The transaction was disclosed in a document filed with the SEC, which is available through this hyperlink. The transaction was executed under a pre-arranged Rule 10b5-1 trading plan. Also, VP Shelley Reynolds sold 2,343 shares of the business’s stock in a transaction that occurred on Friday, August 21st. The stock was sold at an average price of $259.01, for a total value of $606,860.43. Following the transaction, the vice president owned 119,780 shares in the company, valued at approximately $31,024,217.80. This represents a 1.92% decrease in their ownership of the stock. Additional details regarding this sale are available in the official SEC disclosure. The transaction was executed under a pre-arranged Rule 10b5-1 trading plan. Insiders have sold 70,589 shares of company stock worth $18,314,015 in the last 90 days. Corporate insiders own 8.90% of the company’s stock.
Analyst Ratings Changes A number of research analysts have recently issued reports on AMZN shares. JPMorgan Chase & Co. increased their target price on Amazon.com from $330.00 to $365.00 and gave the company an “overweight” rating in a research report on Friday, July 31st. Wells Fargo & Company restated an “overweight” rating and set a $328.00 price objective (up from $322.00) on shares of Amazon.com in a research report on Friday, July 31st. The Goldman Sachs Group reaffirmed a “buy” rating and set a $375.00 price objective (up from $335.00) on shares of Amazon.com in a report on Friday, July 31st. Citigroup reiterated a “market outperform” rating on shares of Amazon.com in a research report on Friday, August 14th. Finally, BMO Capital Markets reissued an “outperform” rating and set a $360.00 target price (up from $355.00) on shares of Amazon.com in a research note on Tuesday, July 28th. One research analyst has rated the stock with a Strong Buy rating, fifty-six have issued a Buy rating and two have assigned a Hold rating to the company’s stock. According to data from MarketBeat.com, the company presently has a consensus rating of “Moderate Buy” and a consensus target price of $323.09. View Our Latest Report on Amazon.com
Key Stories Impacting Amazon.com Here are the key news stories impacting Amazon.com this week:
Positive Sentiment: AWS expansion supports long-term growth. AWS is bringing OpenAI, Meta and Anthropic models to AWS GovCloud, potentially strengthening Amazon’s position in government AI workloads. Separately, AWS plans more than $5.3 billion in cloud infrastructure investment in Saudi Arabia. Amazon brings AI models to AWS GovCloud Positive Sentiment: Operating momentum remains a bullish counterweight. Recent coverage highlights accelerating AWS growth, expanding advertising revenue and improving profitability. Amazon’s latest reported quarter included $200.6 billion of revenue, up nearly 20% year over year, while AWS revenue rose 36.7% to $42.2 billion and generated $16.6 billion in operating income. Analysts cited in the articles continue to see additional upside, with a reported median price target of $320. Amazon growth outlook Neutral Sentiment: Capital spending remains a key debate. Amazon’s roughly $220 billion 2026 capital-expenditure plan is intended to build AI and cloud capacity, but investors remain concerned about near-term free-cash-flow pressure and whether the spending will generate adequate returns. Negative Sentiment: FTC lawsuit creates substantial regulatory risk. The Federal Trade Commission and 22 states allege Amazon secretly manipulated ad auctions and used undisclosed surcharges to overcharge approximately 1.2 million advertisers by more than $20 billion. Potential remedies, damages, changes to Amazon Ads and reputational harm could threaten a rapidly growing, high-margin business. Amazon denies the allegations and says regulators mischaracterized its auction system. FTC lawsuit against Amazon Negative Sentiment: Near-term sentiment is particularly sensitive because AMZN is trading near record levels. The lawsuit gives investors a fresh reason to take profits and reassess valuation, even as the company’s underlying cloud and advertising growth remains strong. Amazon.com Trading Down 2.5% Shares of AMZN opened at $259.77 on Tuesday. Amazon.com, Inc. has a 52-week low of $196.00 and a 52-week high of $287.20. The stock has a market cap of $2.80 trillion, a PE ratio of 20.90, a price-to-earnings-growth ratio of 1.77 and a beta of 1.45. The firm’s fifty day moving average is $252.16 and its two-hundred day moving average is $241.05. The company has a quick ratio of 0.87, a current ratio of 1.03 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.23.
Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN – Get Free Report) last issued its earnings results on Thursday, July 30th. The e-commerce giant reported $5.75 EPS for the quarter, beating analysts’ consensus estimates of $1.82 by $3.93. The business had revenue of $200.61 billion during the quarter, compared to analysts’ expectations of $197.03 billion. Amazon.com had a net margin of 17.44% and a return on equity of 18.00%. The company’s quarterly revenue was up 19.6% compared to the same quarter last year. During the same period in the prior year, the business earned $1.68 earnings per share. Research analysts forecast that Amazon.com, Inc. will post 8.05 earnings per share for the current fiscal year.
Amazon.com Company Profile (Free Report)
Amazon.com, Inc is a diversified technology and retail company best known for its e-commerce marketplace and broad portfolio of consumer and enterprise services. Founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994 and headquartered in Seattle, Washington, the company launched as an online bookseller and expanded into a global retail platform that sells products directly to consumers and provides a marketplace for third-party sellers. Over time Amazon has grown beyond retail into areas including cloud computing, digital media, devices and logistics.
Key businesses and offerings include Amazon’s online marketplace and fulfillment services, the Amazon Prime membership program (which bundles expedited shipping with streaming and other benefits), Amazon Web Services (AWS) which supplies on-demand cloud computing and storage to businesses and public-sector customers, and a range of content and advertising services such as Prime Video and Amazon Advertising.
Featured Articles Five stocks we like better than Amazon.com Securing AI: 5 Most-Upgraded Stocks From the Q2 Reporting Season Insiders Are Betting Big on These 3 Healthcare Stocks 3 Stocks for Investors Who Still Believe Cash Is King Dollar General and Dollar Tree Are Recovering, But Not for the Same Reason
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Clarendon Private LLC increased its position in shares of Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN – Free Report) by 10.5% during the 2nd quarter, according to its most recent Form 13F filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission. The firm owned 23,686 shares of the e-commerce giant’s stock after acquiring an additional 2,243 shares during the quarter. Amazon.com comprises about 3.6% of Clarendon Private LLC’s investment portfolio, making the stock its 5th largest position. Clarendon Private LLC’s holdings in Amazon.com were worth $5,645,000 at the end of the most recent reporting period.
Several other large investors have also bought and sold shares of AMZN. Trust Asset Management LLC grew its stake in shares of Amazon.com by 3.3% during the second quarter. Trust Asset Management LLC now owns 107,563 shares of the e-commerce giant’s stock worth $26,000 after purchasing an additional 3,414 shares during the period. MilWealth Group LLC increased its stake in Amazon.com by 79.0% during the 4th quarter. MilWealth Group LLC now owns 179 shares of the e-commerce giant’s stock worth $41,000 after purchasing an additional 79 shares in the last quarter. Lifetime Wealth Management P.C. bought a new stake in Amazon.com during the 4th quarter worth approximately $45,000. Elkhorn Partners Limited Partnership raised its holdings in Amazon.com by 900.0% during the 4th quarter. Elkhorn Partners Limited Partnership now owns 200 shares of the e-commerce giant’s stock worth $46,000 after buying an additional 180 shares during the period. Finally, Fairway Wealth LLC lifted its stake in Amazon.com by 95.6% in the fourth quarter. Fairway Wealth LLC now owns 221 shares of the e-commerce giant’s stock valued at $51,000 after buying an additional 108 shares in the last quarter. 72.20% of the stock is currently owned by institutional investors and hedge funds.
Insiders Place Their Bets In other Amazon.com news, CEO Matthew S. Garman sold 14,541 shares of the stock in a transaction on Friday, August 21st. The shares were sold at an average price of $259.06, for a total value of $3,766,991.46. Following the completion of the sale, the chief executive officer owned 17,794 shares in the company, valued at $4,609,713.64. This trade represents a 44.97% decrease in their ownership of the stock. The sale was disclosed in a legal filing with the SEC, which is available through this link. The transaction was executed under a pre-arranged Rule 10b5-1 trading plan. Also, CEO Andrew R. Jassy sold 20,000 shares of Amazon.com stock in a transaction dated Friday, August 21st. The shares were sold at an average price of $259.01, for a total transaction of $5,180,200.00. Following the completion of the transaction, the chief executive officer directly owned 2,235,766 shares of the company’s stock, valued at approximately $579,085,751.66. This trade represents a 0.89% decrease in their position. Additional details regarding this sale are available in the official SEC disclosure. The transaction was executed under a pre-arranged Rule 10b5-1 trading plan. Insiders sold 70,589 shares of company stock valued at $18,314,015 in the last ninety days. 8.90% of the stock is currently owned by insiders.
Analyst Upgrades and Downgrades Several research firms have recently weighed in on AMZN. Pivotal Research reiterated a “buy” rating and issued a $333.00 price target (up from $320.00) on shares of Amazon.com in a report on Friday, July 31st. The Goldman Sachs Group restated a “buy” rating and set a $375.00 price objective (up from $335.00) on shares of Amazon.com in a report on Friday, July 31st. Evercore set a $355.00 price objective on shares of Amazon.com and gave the company an “outperform” rating in a research report on Friday. Weiss Ratings reaffirmed a “buy (b)” rating on shares of Amazon.com in a research note on Monday, August 3rd. Finally, Telsey Advisory Group set a $335.00 target price on Amazon.com and gave the company an “outperform” rating in a research report on Friday, July 31st. One research analyst has rated the stock with a Strong Buy rating, fifty-six have issued a Buy rating and two have given a Hold rating to the company. Based on data from MarketBeat, the company presently has an average rating of “Moderate Buy” and a consensus price target of $323.09. Get Our Latest Analysis on Amazon.com
Key Amazon.com News Here are the key news stories impacting Amazon.com this week:
Positive Sentiment: AWS expansion supports long-term growth. AWS is bringing OpenAI, Meta and Anthropic models to AWS GovCloud, potentially strengthening Amazon’s position in government AI workloads. Separately, AWS plans more than $5.3 billion in cloud infrastructure investment in Saudi Arabia. Amazon brings AI models to AWS GovCloud Positive Sentiment: Operating momentum remains a bullish counterweight. Recent coverage highlights accelerating AWS growth, expanding advertising revenue and improving profitability. Amazon’s latest reported quarter included $200.6 billion of revenue, up nearly 20% year over year, while AWS revenue rose 36.7% to $42.2 billion and generated $16.6 billion in operating income. Analysts cited in the articles continue to see additional upside, with a reported median price target of $320. Amazon growth outlook Neutral Sentiment: Capital spending remains a key debate. Amazon’s roughly $220 billion 2026 capital-expenditure plan is intended to build AI and cloud capacity, but investors remain concerned about near-term free-cash-flow pressure and whether the spending will generate adequate returns. Negative Sentiment: FTC lawsuit creates substantial regulatory risk. The Federal Trade Commission and 22 states allege Amazon secretly manipulated ad auctions and used undisclosed surcharges to overcharge approximately 1.2 million advertisers by more than $20 billion. Potential remedies, damages, changes to Amazon Ads and reputational harm could threaten a rapidly growing, high-margin business. Amazon denies the allegations and says regulators mischaracterized its auction system. FTC lawsuit against Amazon Negative Sentiment: Near-term sentiment is particularly sensitive because AMZN is trading near record levels. The lawsuit gives investors a fresh reason to take profits and reassess valuation, even as the company’s underlying cloud and advertising growth remains strong. Amazon.com Stock Performance Shares of NASDAQ AMZN opened at $259.77 on Tuesday. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.23, a quick ratio of 0.87 and a current ratio of 1.03. The stock has a 50 day moving average price of $252.16 and a 200 day moving average price of $241.05. The stock has a market capitalization of $2.80 trillion, a PE ratio of 20.90, a price-to-earnings-growth ratio of 1.77 and a beta of 1.45. Amazon.com, Inc. has a 52 week low of $196.00 and a 52 week high of $287.20.
Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN – Get Free Report) last posted its quarterly earnings results on Thursday, July 30th. The e-commerce giant reported $5.75 earnings per share for the quarter, topping the consensus estimate of $1.82 by $3.93. Amazon.com had a return on equity of 18.00% and a net margin of 17.44%.The firm had revenue of $200.61 billion for the quarter, compared to analyst estimates of $197.03 billion. During the same quarter in the previous year, the firm earned $1.68 EPS. The business’s quarterly revenue was up 19.6% on a year-over-year basis. Analysts predict that Amazon.com, Inc. will post 8.05 earnings per share for the current fiscal year.
Amazon.com Company Profile (Free Report)
Amazon.com, Inc is a diversified technology and retail company best known for its e-commerce marketplace and broad portfolio of consumer and enterprise services. Founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994 and headquartered in Seattle, Washington, the company launched as an online bookseller and expanded into a global retail platform that sells products directly to consumers and provides a marketplace for third-party sellers. Over time Amazon has grown beyond retail into areas including cloud computing, digital media, devices and logistics.
Key businesses and offerings include Amazon’s online marketplace and fulfillment services, the Amazon Prime membership program (which bundles expedited shipping with streaming and other benefits), Amazon Web Services (AWS) which supplies on-demand cloud computing and storage to businesses and public-sector customers, and a range of content and advertising services such as Prime Video and Amazon Advertising.
Featured Articles Five stocks we like better than Amazon.com Securing AI: 5 Most-Upgraded Stocks From the Q2 Reporting Season Insiders Are Betting Big on These 3 Healthcare Stocks 3 Stocks for Investors Who Still Believe Cash Is King Dollar General and Dollar Tree Are Recovering, But Not for the Same Reason
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SUNNYVALE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- #AlikeAudience--AlikeAudience, a global omnichannel data company providing privacy-compliant audience intelligence to brands and agencies, today announced the availability of its audience segments within the Amazon DSP Audience Hub. With this integration, advertisers and agency buyers activating campaigns through Amazon DSP Audience Hub can access AlikeAudience's third-party audience segments across Amazon-owned and operated properties, helping brands extend reach beyond Ama.
Amazon (AMZN -2.10%) has underperformed the broader market over the past five years. Over this period, the company has dealt with a CEO change (which was technically slightly over five years ago), a rare net loss, macroeconomic headwinds, increased competition in the cloud computing industry, and several other challenges. That said, there is still a lot to like about the company's business, and, in my view, the e-commerce specialist is likely to outperform broader equities over the next five years. Here's how much the stock could be worth by 2031.
Image source: The Motley Fool.
Key profit drivers Amazon is investing heavily in its artificial intelligence (AI) ambitions. The company is now expecting $220 billion in capex this year. The tech leader is already seeing the results from these efforts. In the second quarter, Amazon's revenue increased by 20% year over year to $200.6 billion. The company's cloud computing segment, Amazon Web Services (AWS), posted $42.2 billion in net sales, up 37% year over year.
Amazon said that was the segment's fastest growth rate in 18 quarters. AWS accounts for most of Amazon's operating profits. Second quarter operating income jumped 43% to $27.5 billion. AWS's operating income was $16.6 billion, up almost 63% compared to the year-ago period. The company's net earnings per share (EPS) were $5.75, up from $1.68 reported in the year-ago quarter, although that figure included the positive impact of equity investments.
Over the next few years, several things will pull Amazon's EPS growth in opposite directions. Analysts actually expect the company's EPS to decline in 2027 compared to this year. Why? Largely because of its significant capex. Amazon's current expensive AWS investments and AI build-out are front-loaded, but the initial investment in data centers can generate significant revenue for years after. Amazon isn't blindly investing money either.
As the company has argued, it is currently capacity-constrained. It needs more investment to meet the demand for its cloud and AI products and services. That means that even if EPS falls next year, it could grow at a good clip from 2028 to the early 2030s, as Amazon more than recoups its investments. Several other factors could improve the company's profits and margins. Consider that Amazon is increasingly relying on internally developed AI chips.
That's much cheaper than buying from external providers. Amazon has also said that its Trainium franchise can beat comparable GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) in price-performance and should help AWS improve margins. What's more, Amazon could, eventually, start selling its Trainium chips to external customers, another potential growth avenue. But what about the company's other segments?
E-commerce still generates most of its sales, and that won't change in the next five years. Amazon could see improved profits and margins in e-commerce too, as it increasingly relies on AI to cut costs and boost engagement and gross merchandise volume. Don't expect significant gains within this unit. But at Amazon's scale, even minor improvements could have a meaningful impact on the entire business.
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Amazon's stock price in five yearsAmazon's shares are currently trading at about $261 apiece. The company's forward price-to-earnings ratio is 21.8, compared to an average of 23.8 for consumer discretionary stocks. That valuation seems more than fair for a company of Amazon's stature that is posting strong financial results and boasts several important avenues for growth. Let's assume Amazon's earnings grow at a compound annual rate of 12% through the next five years, while its forward P/E stays constant throughout this period. The stock will be worth about $460 by the end of our period.
That's a healthy 12% annualized return. Can Amazon actually pull that off? It all depends on our assumptions, including the 12% average earnings grow. That would require Amazon's net income to jump significantly in 2028 and to maintain a healthy pace through 2031, given it will likely decline next year. But as we have seen, the company's investments could help it meet the demand for services in its most important segment, AWS, while the cloud computing giant continues to seek productivity gains through relying more on custom AI chips.
What about assuming that the market will price Amazon's future earnings at similar levels in five years? If the company can show that its AI build-out is justified, which it could do over the next few years -- provided AWS sales growth remains healthy -- this assumption may also prove reasonable.
Of course, this estimate may turn out to be wrong in either direction. But a bullish outlook for Amazon's medium term seems justified given recent financial results and the general trajectory of the cloud computing and AI industries. So, I'd advise investors to purchase the company's shares and hold onto them through 2031.
The Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) latest lawsuit against Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) is being billed as a case about secret advertising price hikes. But Amazon’s response suggests a much broader battle is taking shape—one that could determine how regulators scrutinize AI-powered algorithms that increasingly decide which ads consumers see, how much advertisers pay, and how digital marketplaces function.
Amazon’s AI Ad AuctionsThe FTC and attorneys general from 22 states allege Amazon manipulated its Sponsored Ads auctions by using undisclosed “soft reserve prices” that inflated advertising costs by more than $20 billion since 2019, affecting more than 1.2 million advertisers. Regulators claim Amazon quietly transformed what advertisers believed were traditional second-price auctions into a system that extracted significantly higher payments.
Amazon, however, frames the case very differently.
In a detailed response published after the lawsuit, the company said the FTC “fundamentally misunderstands how advertisers operate,” arguing that advertisers optimize campaigns based on performance rather than auction mechanics. It also contends that “advertisers paid the same and got more” as its machine learning models improved ad relevance and conversion rates.
That distinction shifts the debate beyond advertising prices and toward the algorithms themselves.
AI Algorithms Take Center StageAmazon says its advertising platform evolved from auctions largely driven by the highest bid to systems that increasingly prioritize relevance using advanced machine learning models. According to the company, that change resulted in “average winning bids” falling 50% between 2019 and 2025, while roughly 92% of sponsored ads shown to shoppers were not awarded to the highest bidder.
The FTC, by contrast, argues that Amazon simultaneously introduced undisclosed reserve pricing that allowed it to collect substantially more from advertisers while preserving the appearance of competitive auctions. The agency alleges those hidden mechanisms generated tens of billions of dollars in additional revenue and were intentionally concealed because revealing them could have led advertisers to lower their bids.
The disagreement is significant because neither side disputes that algorithms—not humans—are making increasingly complex decisions inside Amazon’s advertising marketplace. Instead, they disagree over whether those algorithms merely optimize outcomes or effectively reshape pricing.
Read Next
Amazon Advertising BusinessThat question matters well beyond Amazon’s advertising unit, which generated roughly $68 billion in revenue last year and has become one of the company’s fastest-growing, high-margin businesses.
Amazon insists “in no scenario does an advertiser pay more than their bid” and argues the case centers on generalized second-price auctions that have been “the industry standard for decades.” It also says the FTC’s complaint “cites no evidence of consumer price increases” and relies on “a handful of simplified communications to allege a companywide effort to deceive.”
Investors should look beyond whether Amazon ultimately wins or loses this lawsuit. The more consequential issue is whether courts begin treating AI-driven auction algorithms as business practices subject to the same disclosure and consumer protection standards as traditional pricing decisions.
If regulators succeed in challenging how algorithmic marketplaces operate—not just what they charge—the implications could extend far beyond Amazon to every digital platform where AI increasingly determines prices, rankings and commercial outcomes.
Amazon shares came under pressure on Tuesday as investors weighed a new antitrust lawsuit from US regulators against the company’s growing advertising business, while broader market weakness added to the selling pressure.
Amazon AMZN stock was down nearly 1.8% in trading, extending Monday’s decline after the Federal Trade Commission and 22 US states sued the e-commerce giant over allegations that it manipulated the prices advertisers paid to promote products on its marketplace.
The broader market was also under pressure, with inflation concerns and higher oil prices pushing bond yields higher and raising questions about whether the Federal Reserve could maintain a restrictive policy stance later this month.
S&P 500 and Dow Jones were down about 0.6% and 0.4% respectively, while the Nasdaq Composite fell more than 1%.
The FTC alleges Amazon illegally raised prices for advertisers by secretly increasing the minimum amount required to place advertisements promoting products on its marketplace.
According to the agency, Amazon systematically inflated advertising auction prices without advertisers’ knowledge, potentially costing them $20 billion or more.
"Amazon has been able to generate billions of dollars in profits — at the expense of its auction advertising customers," the FTC said in its lawsuit filed in federal court in the Western District of Washington.
The agency said advertisers suffered billions of dollars in losses because of higher advertising prices.
The states involved in the case could seek civil penalties and attempt to recover some of the alleged damages.
A US official said the FTC would seek "tens of billions" in damages, although the final amount has yet to be determined.
The case could therefore become another significant financial and regulatory liability for Amazon if the allegations are ultimately upheld.
Amazon has pushed back strongly against the accusations, arguing that its advertising system is designed to improve the relevance of advertisements shown to shoppers.
In a blog post Monday, the company said the average cost per click for advertisers remained flat between 2019 and 2024, while sales generated from those clicks increased.
"Amazon's approach to pricing contradicts any suggestion of consumer harm," the company said.
"We provide customers the lowest prices every day across the widest selection of products, and work to ensure our retail and grocery prices meet or beat those offered by other retailers."
The dispute comes as advertising has become an increasingly important contributor to Amazon’s financial performance.
The company’s advertising operation has grown into a high-margin business and is now the third-largest digital advertising platform globally, behind Alphabet and Meta Platforms.
Amazon’s advertising revenue increased 26% in the latest quarter to $19.8 billion, highlighting why the business has become increasingly important to investors.
Despite the lawsuit, analysts have largely maintained a constructive view of Amazon’s underlying business.
Citi said the FTC action could create near-term pressure on Amazon shares, but argued that the company’s advertising business remains strong, Stockwits said.
It saw the pullback as a buying opportunity.
The firm pointed to continued advertiser spending on Amazon, suggesting marketers are increasingly willing to allocate budgets to the platform because of the sales returns generated by its advertising products.
Citi continues to rate Amazon as a ‘Buy’ and has a $350 price target, implying more than 37% upside from Monday’s closing price.
The firm also highlighted improving artificial-intelligence demand at AWS, arguing that accelerating AI-related spending could support cloud growth and strengthen Amazon’s broader earnings outlook.
AWS AI spending remains a major catalystAmazon’s cloud business remains one of the biggest reasons investors continue to look beyond the regulatory risks.
Citizens recently maintained its Market Outperform rating and $315 price target for Amazon, pointing to continued strength in AWS infrastructure spending.
AWS has committed to purchasing 2 million additional Nvidia GPUs across 2027 and 2028, on top of more than 1 million units previously announced.
The cloud division also plans to deploy its Vera CPUs as part of its infrastructure expansion.
Citizens said the commitments demonstrate sustained demand for Nvidia hardware even as AWS continues developing its own custom silicon.
That combination of external AI chips and internally developed infrastructure could allow Amazon to expand its capacity to serve customers racing to build AI applications.
Amazon is also positioning artificial intelligence as a potential growth driver across its retail business.
Evercore ISI recently raised its Amazon price target to $355 following a positive US Online Retail survey, according to Investing.com.
The survey found that 57% of users of Alexa AI had purchased products they were previously unaware of, according to the firm.
Evercore sees the result as an early indication of the potential for agentic AI to influence Amazon’s retail business.
The technology could eventually allow Amazon’s AI systems to play a more active role in helping customers discover products, make purchasing decisions and complete transactions.
For investors, that provides another potential growth avenue beyond AWS and digital advertising.
Amazon now faces its third major FTC case, adding to a growing list of regulatory challenges surrounding the company.
Last September, Amazon agreed to pay $2.5 billion to settle allegations that it deceptively enrolled consumers into Amazon Prime and made cancellations unnecessarily difficult.
Alphabet's Waymo is expanding its commercial service, and Amazon's Zoox said it plans to test in more U.S. cities, as the nascent robotaxi market gains momentum.
Waymo, which has a commanding market lead in the U.S., said it's now offering driverless rides to customers in San Diego, Tampa, Florida, and Denver, the first time the company will have commercial operations in Colorado.
Zoox, meanwhile, said it will begin testing its toaster-shaped vehicles in Houston and San Diego with human drivers on board. The company said it will have a presence in 12 U.S. markets when those two cities open.
The announcements come ahead of a planned event on Thursday from Tesla, which is expected to share details about its driverless Cybercab and its Robotaxi ride-hailing service. Goldman Sachs Research forecasts the U.S. robotaxi market will reach $19 billion in 2030, up from about $3 billion next year, before jumping to $48 billion in 2035.
Waymo now boasts over 4,000 vehicles across 14 U.S. cities. Its fleet includes the newer, roomier Ojai vehicles based on a Zeekr minivan-style chassis. They're assembled at a factory in Arizona and include automatic sliding doors, three large in-car screens, Waymo's sixth-generation driverless technology and an entertainment system with a Gemini integration.
A Waymo spokesperson said in an email that in each of the three new U.S. cities, the company will have dozens of robotaxis, with plans to reach "hundreds over time," and that passengers will need to hail rides through the Waymo app.
Waymo provides over 500,000 robotaxi rides in the U.S. each week, and aims to cross the 1 million ride mark by the end of 2026. In some markets, the company offers rides through Uber.
Zoox is far behind Waymo, as its only paid ride-hailing service today operates in Las Vegas. Zoox has a free service in San Francisco for select riders and hasn't said when it will open a paid service there.
While the AV market is rapidly growing, it's encountering criticism from labor leaders who worry that autonomous vehicles will eliminate jobs in transportation, and from vehicle safety advocates who want the companies to disclose and standardize their mileage and crash data.
AVs can cause safety issues, especially during inclement weather, blackouts and on roads where there's construction or unusual traffic. In some cases, they've caused gridlock or have required first responders to manually move the vehicles.
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Happy Tuesday. If you ran into some technology troubles at work yesterday, you weren't alone.
Stock futures are down this morning. The market is coming off a losing day.
Here are five key things investors need to know to start the trading day:
1. New Cook in the kitchenJohn Ternus officially takes over as CEO of Apple today. He succeeds Tim Cook, who will step into the executive chairman role after 15 years at the helm of the technology titan.
As CNBC's Kif Leswing writes, we haven't heard much from Ternus since the succession plan was announced in April. He made only a small appearance on Apple's earnings call last month, when he was asked a question directly by an analyst. But the world will get to see more of Ternus next week at Apple's annual launch event, where the company is expected to reveal its new iPhone and Apple Watches.
On his last day as CEO, Cook said yesterday that he was "excited for the next chapter." He wrote in a post on X, "My title changes tomorrow, but the love I have for the Apple community never will."
2. On the rise3. Growing painsMeetings between finance ministers from the Group of 20 countries continue today in North Carolina. The agenda includes a fireside chat with Fox Business' Larry Kudlow — the former director of the National Economic Council — and a press conference with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.
The Treasury chief told reporters yesterday that the U.S. has "to grow our way out" of its debt pile. Federal Reserve Chairman Kevin Warsh also focused on growth in brief remarks to the gathering of international finance leaders, calling the current period "one of secular growth" and "one of a global investment surge."
In an interview with CNBC's Sara Eisen, Bessent also responded to Stanley Druckenmiller's critique of the Treasury Department's intervention in the bond market, saying the billionaire investor "changes his mind a lot."
4. Contempt of cartThe Federal Trade Commission and 22 state attorneys general are taking Amazon to court.
In a lawsuit filed yesterday, the group alleges that Amazon "secretly and systematically overcharged" advertisers through price manipulation. The suit also claims that Amazon may have raked in more than $20 billion via "hidden surcharges" going back to a change in its auction rules from 2019.
FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson said in a statement that the higher costs facing advertisers "were largely passed on to American consumers." Amazon in a blog post slammed the lawsuit as "misguided," saying it "fundamentally misunderstands how advertisers operate." Shares of the e-commerce giant fell 2.5% in yesterday's session.
5. InfomercialAfter years of success in China, so-called livestream shopping is becoming all the rage in the U.S. Apps like TikTok and Whatnot are largely to thank.
The U.S. industry is forecast to see almost $20 billion in sales this year, according to eMarketer, more than double 2024's figure and a roughly 35% year-over-year increase.
As CNBC's Ryan Baker reports, livestream shopping can act as a bridge between brick-and-mortar and digital retail. While the U.S. market is quickly gaining steam, it's still dwarfed by China's.
The Daily DividendTrump brushed off the brewing backlash to artificial intelligence data centers yesterday. Here's what he wrote in a Truth Social post:
The only reason that communities throughout the U.S.A. should not want Data Centers is if they want to end up being backwards and poor.
President Donald Trump
— CNBC's Ashley Capoot, Jonathan Vanian, Sean Conlon, Hugh Leask, Justina Lee, Chloe Taylor, Spencer Kimball, Luke Fountain, Lee Ying Shan, Tobias Burns, Kevin Breuninger, Jeff Cox, Annie Palmer, Dan Mangan and Ryan Baker contributed to this report.
Luke Fountain assisted in the production of this newsletter. Josephine Rozzelle edited this edition.
Patients get delivery transparency at the point of booking; providers receive pharmacy preferences automatically with no extra steps
SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--For many patients, the healthcare journey doesn't end when they leave the clinic, it ends when they have their medication and are able to get better. Today Solv announced a new integration with Amazon Pharmacy that shows patients real-time prescription delivery options—including same-day delivery—directly within the medical appointment booking process. Once a patient selects Amazon Pharmacy, their pharmacy preference is sent directly to the provider’s Electronic Health Record (EHR), requiring no additional work from clinical staff.
“Collaborating with Amazon Pharmacy was an obvious choice because of the speed and convenience they bring to getting prescriptions to patients' doors. Their technology lets us show patients exactly when that will happen, right at the moment they’re booking care,” said Heather Fernandez, founder and CEO of Solv. "Our providers deliver same-day care to millions of patients per month, and now their prescriptions arrive just as fast.”
Amazon Pharmacy's technology enables patients to see, in real time, when their prescriptions can arrive—including same-day delivery in more than 3,100 U.S. cities, expanding to nearly 4,500 by the end of 2026—or next-day where available.
"Amazon Pharmacy was built to make getting medications as simple and fast as possible, with same-day and next-day delivery options that meet patients where they are. Our work with Solv puts that speed and transparency in front of patients at the moment they're scheduling care, so they can see when their prescription will arrive before they even walk into the clinic," said Tanvi Patel, Vice President and General Manager of Amazon Pharmacy. "That kind of visibility lets patients focus on getting better, not figuring out how to get their medication."
As Solv continues building the AI-powered operating system for modern healthcare providers, the company sees pharmacy integration as another step toward creating a fully connected patient journey, one where scheduling, intake, communication, payments, prescriptions, and follow-up care work together to reduce friction and improve the patient experience. Patients remain free to select any pharmacy they prefer.
To learn more about how Solv securely connects pharmacy selection with prescription fulfillment leading to a better patient experience, click here.
About Solv
Solv is the AI Operating System for on-demand care, powering the patient journey from discovery through follow-up for healthcare providers nationwide. With more than 115 million appointments booked, Solv's national network reaches 210 million Americans within five miles of a same-day appointment across 48 states. Its platform helps practices automate patient access, communications, insurance verification, and revenue workflows. Learn more at solvhealth.com.
About Amazon Pharmacy
Amazon Pharmacy is a full-service pharmacy that brings prescription medications directly to customers’ doors with free two-day delivery for Prime members and same-day delivery in eligible locations. The service offers 24/7 access to pharmacists, transparent pricing, and multiple ways to save. Amazon Pharmacy accepts most insurance plans, automatically applies eligible manufacturer-sponsored coupons, and offers additional savings options for Prime members through RxPass and Prime Rx. For those managing multiple daily medications, PillPack from Amazon Pharmacy sorts medications by date and time into convenient packets, then delivers them to customers’ doors at no extra cost.
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and 22 states sued Amazon on Monday for allegedly "manipulating" online auctions for digital advertising, resulting in more than $20 billion in overcharges for 1.2 million customers.
Though Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) stock suffered an 8.54% decline to $259.77 through August and is facing a new FTC lawsuit over alleged overcharging, Wall Street analysts remain optimistic about the e-commerce and technology giant.
Amazon stock price one-month chart. Source: Google Indeed, in the last three days alone, AMZN shares saw three 12-month price target revisions, placing the equity’s value well above $300 by the start of September 2027.
The first of these was provided by Citizens analyst Andrew Boone, who, along with maintaining the ‘Market Outperform’ – ‘Buy’ – rating for the firm, assessed that Amazon stock will rise to $315: 21.26% above the latest close at $259.77.
Wells Fargo’s (NYSE: WFC) Ike Boruchow proved even more optimistic on August 31 when he issued a ‘Buy’ recommendation for AMZN equity and estimated it would rise 26.27% to $328 in the next 12 months.
Simultaneously, the last of the three most recent revisions was also the most bullish. Specifically, Eric Sheridan, an analyst from Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS), gave Amazon stock a positive rating and set his price target at $375: 14.33% higher than Boruchow, 19.05% over Boone’s, and 44.36% above the shares’ latest close.
Analysts predict Amazon stock price in 12 months Zooming out, the most recent notes are largely in line with the average Wall Street attitude toward AMZN. Examining the forty ratings issued in the last three months reveals an almost universal bullishness for the e-commerce and technology blue-chip as, among them, there is only a single ‘Neutral’ and no negative recommendations.
Additionally, the average price target for the next 12 months stands at $334.05, meaning Amazon stock is generally expected to rally 28.60% from its August 31 close at $259.77.
Wall Street sets Amazon stock price for the next 12 months. Source: TipRanks Finally, AMZN shares received no forecasts below $300 through the entirety of the previous months, despite recording a substantial decline within the timeframe, highlighting confidence in the company’s core business, as well as the importance of AWS for the ongoing artificial intelligence (AI) ‘boom’.
Featured image via Shutterstock
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The Federal Trade Commission filed a bombshell lawsuit against Amazon, alleging that the e-commerce giant illegally reaped tens of billions of dollars by manipulating the prices businesses paid to advertise on its website.
The explosive, 181-page complaint filed on Monday is joined by a bipartisan group of 22 attorneys general representing California, Florida, New York, Louisiana and Iowa, who allege that Amazon bilked advertisers by stealthily placing its own bids in ad auctions to jack up prices.
Advertisers were allegedly duped out of $20 billion over seven years beginning in 2018 because of the inflated ad prices, according to the complaint by the FTC, chaired by Andrew Ferguson.
Andrew Ferguson, chair of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), is suing Amazon for deceptive advertising practices. AFP via Getty Images “Since 2019, Amazon.com has secretly and systematically overcharged its approximately 1.2 million advertising customers,” according the lawsuit. “Amazon overrides and replaces the actual auction results with higher prices set by Amazon to increase its profits.”
The suit was filed in Seattle federal court and is the third such action brought the agency against the e-commerce giant. Last year, Amazon agreed to a $2.5 billion settlement with the FTC over charges that it knowingly trapped customers into paying for Prime subscriptions.
Amazon is the third-largest digital-ad platform behind Google and Meta, earning $68 billion from ads last year.
The FTC claims that Amazon’s strategy of illegally raising prices started when it entered its own bids in the auctions it ran to solicit advertising, the suit alleges. The advertisers are competing for exposure on Amazon’s platform to position their brand at the top each time a shopper searches for a product.
The so-called “soft reserve” Amazon bids raised the auction floor for bids, but the other competing merchants were not aware that Amazon submitted a bid to goose the results.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was chief executive of the company when the alleged advertising scheme started. AP Photo/Emma Da Silva The complaint alleges that Amazon’s strategy raised the pay-per-click ad cost by 50% on major shopping days, according to the Wall Street Journal. In recent years, Amazon has intervened in auctions to raise the minimum price 70% to 80% of the time, according to FTC officials.
“Amazon gave its customers no notice of this change and took affirmative steps to conceal it,” according to the lawsuit.
Amazon on Monday said its ad practices had no impact on consumers and claimed that it properly disclosed how its auctions work. It said its ad technology has improved to help advertisers better attract customers and maximize sales, thus increasing its value.
“After reviewing approximately 1.5 million pages spanning six years, the FTC leans on a handful of simplified communications to allege a companywide effort to deceive,” Amazon said in a Monday statement. “That is patently false.”
The Federal Trade Commission has taken several recent legal jabs at the Seattle giant. AP The digital ad deception allegedly started in 2018 under founder and executive chairman Jeff Bezos. For years, Amazon has secretly inflated the auction prices for three of its advertising products: Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Display, the suit claims.
On Amazon’s crucial post-Thanksgiving “Black Friday” event in 2024, an Amazon executive “discussed ‘dial[ing] up’ reserve prices immediately because revenue ‘came in under’ Amazon’s financial plan for Sponsored Products advertising,” the suit alleged.
Among the victims of this scheme are some 500,000 small and medium-size businesses, regulators allege.
“It’s odd that Amazon’s first response to this suit is that consumers — buyers on Amazon — are not harmed, because that’s not required for the FTC to win this case,” Rebecca Haw Allensworth, a Vanderbilt Law prof specializing in antitrust, told The Post.
“The harm alleged is to advertisers, not purchasers of goods on the platform,” she added.
“For Amazon to win, it will have to show that it either did not falsely describe its auctions or that if it did so, it didn’t matter because advertisers don’t make bidding decisions based on the internal mechanics of the auctions.”
Last year, similar antitrust charges were brought against Google and a federal judge found that the Silicon Valley giant was a monopolist.
“It helps the FTC to have a diverse group of states in building a coalition…in the world of politics it’s a helpful coalition to have. That’s a good sign.” said former FTC chairman William Kovacic, who is
Director of the Competition Law Center at George Washington University.
Amazon’s shares were down 3% to about $259 on Monday afternoon.
The Federal Trade Commission and 22 states sued Amazon on Monday, claiming the e-commerce giant secretly made advertising more expensive on its website for more than a million companies.
In a lawsuit filed in a federal court in Seattle, Amazon’s hometown, the F.T.C. and the states said Amazon inflated the costs that brands and marketplace sellers had to pay to promote their products to consumers, including the prominent “Sponsored Product” ads that appear in search results on Amazon’s widely used website.
“Amazon has millions of advertising customers who were misled into paying significantly higher prices,” Andrew N. Ferguson, the chairman of the F.T.C., said in a statement. “These higher costs were largely passed on to American consumers.”
Amazon disputed the charges in a blog post. The company said the F.T.C.’s claim “fundamentally misunderstands how advertisers operate.” Amazon said its mechanisms led to more relevant ads, which created better value for brands and sellers, and that the lawsuit “complaint cites no evidence of consumer price increases.”
The case is one of several lawsuits the F.T.C. has filed against Amazon. In 2023, the agency and 17 states brought a wide-ranging antitrust case against the company, arguing it abused its monopoly in online shopping. That case, whose claims Amazon denies, is set for trial next year.
Last year, Amazon settled a more narrow suit for $2.5 billion over claims it tricked customers into buying Prime memberships and making it hard to cancel when they wanted to leave the program. Amazon did not admit or deny wrongdoing in the settlement.
The 22 states involved in the suit are represented by both Republican and Democratic attorneys general, and include Washington, where Amazon has its headquarters. The suit was reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal.
Advertising has become a crucial source of profit for Amazon, as it has grown into one of the largest ad platforms in the world. Its advertising business produced almost $20 billion in sales in the most recent quarter, up 26 percent from the same period a year earlier, and is widely regarded by investors as the most lucrative part of its consumer business.
The new lawsuit centers on the complex workings of digital advertising. The F.T.C. and attorneys general argue that Amazon told advertisers it was using a common way to solicit and select bids through what is called a “second price” auction. To prevent overbidding, it told advertisers it charged only one cent more than the second highest bid, they said.
But in reality, the 181-page complaint claimed, Amazon had a hidden “soft reserve price,” meaning it created a higher minimum amount it would frequently charge for an ad. The complaint cites internal studies and tests where teams inside of Amazon tested how far they could push the bidding system to produce additional ad sales.
Rob Bonta, California’s attorney general, said in a news conference that, by design, the advertisers had no way to know this was happening.
“Amazon has taken many steps to hide this scheme because, as employees have admitted internally, it knows it creates a ‘irrevocable damage to advertiser trust’ — words straight from an Amazon employee,” he said.
Amazon countered that the “soft reserve prices” change in real time to create a minimum that reflects the value of the real estate on its website, and it never charged advertisers more than they actually bid. It said any vague descriptions the F.T.C. may have cited were minor and fixed once they were flagged.
It also said that its systems favor serving up ads that are relevant to customers rather than just the most expensive. That is both better for the customer, and the advertiser, the company said.
Amazon argued that the results spoke for themselves: When adjusted for inflation, the costs of digital ads have been flat even as they deliver higher sales because they are more relevant. The company said the system didn’t cost advertisers more, but instead helped them save money.
The suit seeks a permanent injunction to stop the alleged violations as well as unspecified monetary penalties.
Amazon is facing a new lawsuit from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and 22 states, which accuse the company of secretly charging businesses more for advertising on its platform.
The lawsuit, filed Monday, claims Amazon spent more than seven years quietly increasing the prices advertisers paid through its online ad auctions. According to the complaint, the alleged practice affected more than 1 million brands and sellers and may have generated tens of billions of dollars in additional revenue for Amazon.
The 22 states joining the FTC are Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Vermont, and Washington.
The lawsuit centers on Amazon’s Sponsored Products ads, Sponsored Brands ads, and Display ads that run alongside its search results. According to the FTC, Amazon told more than 500,000 small and medium-sized businesses that it ran a “second-price” auction where the winning advertiser would pay just one cent more than the next-highest bid, rather than the full amount of their own bid. Because businesses believed they’d only ever pay slightly more than the runner-up, they had an incentive to bid high, trusting the system would keep their actual costs in check.
But the FTC alleges that starting in 2019, Amazon made a “surreptitious” change without telling advertisers. It added a hidden surcharge that Amazon internally called a “soft reserve price,” and used what one internal document called an “invented auction participant” — a fake bidder, basically — to push prices higher than true competition would have produced. The complaint alleges this amounted to a shill bid: rather than the price coming from a real competing advertiser, Amazon was manufacturing a higher number for advertisers to beat. As a result, the FTC claims Amazon charged Sponsored Products advertisers their own full winning bid close to 80% of the time — effectively turning what was marketed as a second-price auction into a first-price one.
The FTC claims Amazon made this change because it wanted more advertising revenue, and kept it hidden because disclosing it could have led advertisers to lower their bids, which would have cut into that revenue.
The company generated more than $68 billion in advertising revenue last year.
In a blog post, Amazon described the FTC’s lawsuit as “misguided,” arguing that the complaint “fundamentally misunderstands how advertisers operate.”
The company added that its auctions evaluate billions of bids across different placements and formats, so prices naturally vary, and advertisers are “properly” informed about the pricing system.
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Movable shelving towers that hold items that are autonomously moved to Amazon employees who pack them for shipping. (GeekWire Photo / Lisa Stiffler) Amazon is accused of artificially inflating the ad prices on its e-commerce site in a lawsuit filed Monday by Washington’s attorney general, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and 21 other states.
Amazon denies the allegations, saying its ad pricing has not harmed advertisers or shoppers and that the FTC’s claims mischaracterize how its system works.
Ads are sold on Amazon’s platform through so-called “second-price” auctions, in which businesses set a maximum price they’re willing to pay for an ad. If they’re the highest bidder, they pay only one cent more than the second-highest bid, and the auctions do not allow advertisers to see other bids.
Plaintiffs allege that beginning in late 2018, Amazon started adding surcharges to the prices, despite claims that it was still using a second-price system.
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington in Seattle, alleges the tech giant overcharged roughly 1.2 million ad customers by overriding and replacing auction results with “higher prices set by Amazon to increase its profits.” The amount collected through the allegedly deceptive pricing scheme totals $20 billion, according to the suit.
“Many small business owners in Washington rely on Amazon for their livelihoods, and our office is committed to making sure Amazon treats them fairly, transparently, and in accordance with the law,” said Nick Brown, Washington’s attorney general, in a statement.
Amazon posted an online response to the allegations. “The FTC’s claim fundamentally misunderstands how advertisers operate,” the company stated. “Advertisers adjust bids based on real-world performance, not descriptions of auction mechanics.”
The company said it prioritizes the relevance of an ad to the shoppers being targeted over bid price alone. As a result, Amazon said, 92% of winning ads in recent years were not given to the highest bidder, and ad performance has improved. Conversion rates — the percentage of shoppers who take a desired action after interacting with an ad — rose 24% from 2021 to 2025, according to Amazon.
The company also said that from 2019 to 2024, the average cost-per-click for sponsored product search ads was flat when adjusted for inflation.
Amazon acknowledged it has changed its ad pricing approach over time, saying that as the system prioritized ad relevance, winning bids increasingly fell below market value. As a result, the company now sets minimum prices, or “reserves,” for participating in an auction and for the minimum market value of the ad.
“Reserves like these,” it said, “are common across the industry.” The company said it does not charge advertisers more than their bid.
Amazon said it clearly explains its pricing process to advertisers. Plaintiffs dispute that, citing company employees who described creating fake auction participants.
The suit states that an Amazon senior scientist said that to increase auction prices, the company inserts “an invented auction participant representing how much Amazon thinks that particular ad slot is worth.”
The lawsuit is being led by the FTC and also includes the attorneys general of Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina and Vermont.
The company is also in the FTC’s crosshairs in a separate, broader antitrust case accusing Amazon of maintaining an illegal monopoly in online retail, which is scheduled for trial next year.
Plaintiffs in the case announced Monday are asking the court to order Amazon to reform its practices, pay restitution and civil penalties for each violation, and cover attorneys’ fees.
Operating cash flow remains enormous, but higher discount rates make Amazon's negative free cash flow harder to overlook. Summary
AI investment increased trailing property-and-equipment purchases by $66.1 billion.
Amazon.com AMZN, the e-commerce and cloud-computing giant, dropped approximately 2.1% to $260.90 Monday as the 10-year Treasury yield charged toward 4.75%. Reuters reported that renewed inflation fears pushed the market-implied probability of a September Federal Reserve rate increase above 60%. Bond yields went up. Amazon went down. The reason is sitting inside its AI spending bill.
Amazon's cash engine is roaring, but its capital expenditures are roaring louder. The company's second-quarter filing showed trailing operating cash flow jumping 33% to $161.4 billion, while free cash flow flipped from an $18.2 billion inflow to a $7.6 billion outflow. That ugly reversal followed a $66.1 billion increase in property and equipment purchases as Amazon poured money into AI infrastructure.
The chart adds another pressure point: Amazon's $260.90 share price sits 5.55% above its $247.18 GF Value™, leaving little room for an AI payoff that takes longer than expected. AWS may eventually turn those servers into a cash machine. For now, investors see a $25.8 billion free-cash-flow swing and a rising risk-free rate. When money gets more expensive, patience gets cheaper.
Disclosures I/we have no positions in any stocks mentioned, and have no plans to buy any new positions in the stocks mentioned within the next 72 hours.
Two of Amazon’s Seattle headquarters towers rise above the Spheres. (GeekWire File Photo / Kurt Schlosser) Amazon is cutting 121 jobs in Washington state, according to a new state regulatory filing on Monday, hitting corporate tech teams in Bellevue and Seattle as well as fulfillment operations in Sumner.
The largest single concentration of cuts is at the SEA106 building in Bellevue, where 49 employees — ranging from entry-level software development engineers and applied scientists to a vice president of legal and senior software managers — were notified.
In Seattle, impacted positions span multiple downtown office buildings and include roles such as a director of human resources, product managers, and technical writers.
Beyond corporate offices, 32 positions were cut at the BFI1 fulfillment center in Sumner, affecting warehouse associates, service technicians, and safety specialists.
“Teams across the company regularly review their structures to ensure they’re best set up to deliver on their goals,” Brad Glasser, an Amazon spokesperson, told GeekWire via email. “As part of these reviews, teams sometimes determine that certain roles are no longer necessary. We don’t take these decisions lightly, and we’re always committed to supporting employees whose roles are impacted by them.”
The Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) filed with the state’s Employment Security Department says impacted employees were notified between July 1 and July 29 and terminations will be effective between Oct. 1 and Oct. 27.
Amazon says it provided 90 days of advance notice, during which affected workers can apply for open internal transfer positions before separations become final.
Amazon employs roughly 50,000 corporate and tech workers in the Puget Sound region, divided between its primary headquarters in Seattle and its growing operational footprint in Bellevue. Across Washington state, the company employs more than 80,000 total workers across corporate offices, data centers, and fulfillment hubs.
Earlier this summer, Amazon cut 57 jobs in Washington. Those layoffs followed cuts of 2,198 Washington-based employees in February and 2,303 in October 2025.
The previous larger cuts were part of an effort to “reduce layers, increase ownership, and remove bureaucracy,” according to a memo sent to employees.
A number of layoffs across the tech sector have impacted Washington employees in recent months, including at Microsoft, Zillow, Meta, Google, T-Mobile, Salesforce, Starbucks, TikTok, Qualtrics and elsewhere.
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission on Monday sued Amazon.com (AMZN.O), with more than 20 U.S. states joining the lawsuit, according to court records.
The agency planned to file a lawsuit, alleging Amazon manipulated prices for advertisements on its e-retail platform, the Wall Street Journal reported earlier in the day, citing FTC officials.
The lawsuit would allege that the company deceived advertisers by secretly raising the minimum price they had to pay to place ads promoting their products, WSJ had reported.
Advertisers allegedly suffered billions of dollars in harm from higher ad prices, while the states could seek civil penalties and attempt to recover some of that money, according to the report.
The e-commerce giant in September last year agreed to pay $2.5 billion in fines and reimbursements to Prime subscribers to settle the FTC's allegations that it deceived its customers to generate subscriptions.
The Federal Trade Commission on Monday sued Amazon, alleging the e-commerce giant "secretly and systematically overcharged" advertisers on its platform by manipulating its pricing and auction systems.
The lawsuit, which was joined by 22 state attorneys general, argues that Amazon may have reaped more than $20 billion from advertisers by using "hidden surcharges" dating back to a change to its auction rules that took effect in 2019.
"Amazon has millions of advertising customers who were misled into paying significantly higher prices," FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson said in a statement. "These higher costs were largely passed on to American consumers."
In a blog post, Amazon called the FTC's lawsuit "misguided" and said the complaint "fundamentally misunderstands how advertisers operate." The company added that the agency's lawsuit doesn't include evidence of consumer price increases.
"We've provided advertisers with guidance about our auctions and pricing in the main tools they use to manage their campaigns, and we continue to update that guidance," the company said. "We look forward to making our case in court."
The complaint, which was filed in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington, centers on Amazon's sponsored products ads, brands ads and display ads that run alongside search results on its sprawling webstore.
Amazon has amassed the third-largest digital advertising business globally, trailing only Google and Meta. The company hauled in more than $68 billion in ads revenue last year, with the lion's share coming from sales of sponsored products ads.
Read more CNBC tech newsHe beat Big Tobacco. Will the same playbook work against Meta and social media?OpenAI to end model access to Cursor after acquisition by Elon Musk's SpaceXTech backlash reaches fever pitch as AI angst collides with social media fearsApple hikes subscription prices for Apple TV and Apple One in the U.S.
ToplineThe Federal Trade Commission filed a major lawsuit against Amazon on Monday, accusing the e-commerce giant of using deceptive prices for advertisers.
The Amazon logo is displayed on a sign outside of a distribution center on May 3, 2025 in San Diego, California.
Photo by Kevin Carter/Getty Images
Key FactsThe lawsuit, which was first reported by the Wall Street Journal, alleges Amazon secretly raised the minimum price advertisers had to pay to place ads for their products.
The lawsuit involves over 20 state attorney generals and covers a seven-year window in which Amazon generated tens of billions of dollars.
Amazon shares tumbled after the report was published and were down nearly 3% at 3 p.m. EDT, falling around the $258 mark.
Big NumberOver $20 billion. That is how much money the FTC has accused Amazon of illegally gaining from “unwitting advertising customers.”
What States Are Involved In The Lawsuit?Attorneys general from Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Vermont, and Washington have joined the lawsuit.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) shares are dipping Monday after a report that the Federal Trade Commission plans to sue the company over allegations it secretly manipulated ad prices paid by merchants on its platform. Here’s what you need to know.
Amazon.com shares are experiencing downward pressure. Why is AMZN stock retreating? FTC to Sue Amazon Over Alleged Ad Price ManipulationThe FTC intends to file a lawsuit against Amazon in federal court in Seattle, according to The Wall Street Journal, alleging the company quietly pushed up the minimum price merchants had to pay to advertise on its platform, generating tens of billions of dollars for Amazon over roughly seven years.
More than 20 state attorneys general from both parties are expected to join the case. It would mark the FTC’s third major legal action against Amazon, following a $2.5 billion settlement last year over Prime cancellation practices and a separate monopoly case set to go before a jury next year.
According to the report, Amazon began adjusting its ad auction system in 2018, quietly inserting its own bid, an internal tool called a “soft reserve,” to push prices above what the next-highest bidder had offered, without disclosing the practice to merchants. Investigators found Amazon leaned on this approach to nudge minimum auction prices upward in roughly 7 or 8 out of every 10 cases in recent years, and that on the busiest shopping days, per-click ad costs climbed by as much as half as a result.
Amazon has publicly acknowledged using reserve pricing, stating on a company webpage that such pricing “may affect the cost of your ad.”
Amazon’s Chart Shows a Pullback Within a Larger UptrendAmazon’s stock has slipped back toward its shorter-term trend lines, sitting about 2.7% below its 20-day average while still holding above its 50-day, 100-day and 200-day averages, a pattern that typically shows up during a routine cooldown inside a broader uptrend, especially with the 50-day average remaining above the 200-day following a golden cross in May.
Momentum is easing rather than breaking down. The relative strength index reads 48.95, a neutral level suggesting neither buyers nor sellers currently have the upper hand. More telling for the stock’s longer-term health is that shares remain 8.2% above their 200-day average, a threshold often treated as a marker of whether a bull market remains intact. The stock’s recent history reflects a fairly typical uptrend pattern, with RSI dipping into oversold territory back in February, a swing low forming in June, and a swing high arriving alongside the stock’s 52-week high in August.
Traders are watching $287 as resistance, just under the stock’s 52-week high near $287.20, a zone where past rallies have lost steam, and $226 as support, a lower level where buyers have previously stepped in if the pullback were to deepen further.
AMZN Shares Are DroppingAMZN Price Action: Amazon.com shares were down 2.92% at $258.65 at the time of publication on Monday, according to Benzinga Pro.
Tech StocksRegulators claim Amazon artificially bumped up floor prices during peak shopping periods, adding surcharges to merchants’ ad spendingUpdated
Shares of Amazon.com were falling 3% on Monday following news that the Federal Trade Commission is looking to crack down on the company’s lucrative digital-advertising business.
The FTC and 22 states plan to file a lawsuit against Amazon AMZN alleging that the company manipulated prices paid by marketplace merchants and caused billions of dollars in harm. The Wall Street Journal first reported the news on Monday, and the FTC confirmed it in a statement.
E Fund Management Hong Kong Co. Ltd. boosted its stake in shares of Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) by 42.7% in the 2nd quarter, according to the company in its most recent disclosure with the SEC. The firm owned 31,295 shares of the e-commerce giant’s stock after buying an additional 9,358 shares during the quarter. Amazon.com makes up approximately 2.5% of E Fund Management Hong Kong Co. Ltd.’s portfolio, making the stock its 10th largest holding. E Fund Management Hong Kong Co. Ltd.’s holdings in Amazon.com were worth $7,459,000 as of its most recent SEC filing.
A number of other large investors have also added to or reduced their stakes in the stock. Vanguard Group Inc. grew its holdings in Amazon.com by 1.1% during the first quarter. Vanguard Group Inc. now owns 832,274,556 shares of the e-commerce giant’s stock valued at $158,348,557,000 after purchasing an additional 8,913,959 shares during the period. State Street Corp lifted its position in shares of Amazon.com by 1.8% during the 4th quarter. State Street Corp now owns 388,653,121 shares of the e-commerce giant’s stock valued at $89,708,913,000 after buying an additional 6,971,680 shares during the last quarter. Geode Capital Management LLC grew its stake in shares of Amazon.com by 1.1% during the 4th quarter. Geode Capital Management LLC now owns 225,120,994 shares of the e-commerce giant’s stock worth $51,753,622,000 after acquiring an additional 2,479,324 shares during the period. Norges Bank bought a new position in shares of Amazon.com during the 4th quarter worth $32,868,735,000. Finally, Auto Owners Insurance Co increased its holdings in Amazon.com by 27,376.7% in the 4th quarter. Auto Owners Insurance Co now owns 98,448,885 shares of the e-commerce giant’s stock worth $2,272,397,000 after acquiring an additional 98,090,585 shares during the last quarter. Hedge funds and other institutional investors own 72.20% of the company’s stock.
Amazon.com News Summary Here are the key news stories impacting Amazon.com this week:
Positive Sentiment: Evercore raises target on agentic AI potential. Evercore ISI lifted its AMZN price target to $355 from $315.16 and maintained an Outperform rating. The firm believes agentic AI could improve retail growth and strengthen trends across Amazon Web Services (AWS), advertising and e-commerce. Why is Amazon stock surging 4% today Positive Sentiment: Expanded Nvidia partnership reinforces AI demand. Amazon plans to add 2 million Nvidia GPUs to its data centers in 2027–2028, bringing its announced commitment to roughly 3 million chips. The spending signals strong expected demand for AWS AI capacity and helped distinguish Amazon positively within the AI infrastructure sector. Amazon just tripled its order of Nvidia chips over surging demand Positive Sentiment: AWS and AI economics remain major growth catalysts. Reports cited approximately 37% AWS revenue growth to $42.2 billion in the second quarter, while Amazon’s AI and chip businesses each reached annualized revenue run rates above $25 billion. Analysts also highlighted solid retail profitability and long-term cloud adoption. Amazon Stock: AI Investment Gains Momentum as AWS Revenue Surges Positive Sentiment: New distribution and energy initiatives support the platform. Amazon plans to expand Prime Air drone delivery to nearly 500 U.S. cities by year-end, while new power-purchase agreements add 600 megawatts of carbon-free electricity and support data-center expansion. Amazon is about to six times its drone delivery footprint Neutral Sentiment: Amazon-backed Zoox is launching robotaxi service in San Francisco, creating a potential long-term growth option but adding an unproven business with significant execution requirements. Amazon-backed Zoox launches robotaxis in San Francisco Negative Sentiment: AI spending is raising return-on-investment concerns. The enlarged GPU commitment adds to an already substantial capital budget, prompting investors to question whether AWS demand and AI monetization will justify the cost. Amazon’s post-earnings gains have also partially faded, and billionaire Bill Ackman reportedly shifted from Amazon to Microsoft. Negative Sentiment: California litigation over alleged price-fixing remains an overhang, although a judge indicated the state’s request to block Amazon’s practices would likely be denied. Judge likely to deny California’s bid to stop Amazon’s alleged price fixing Insider Transactions at Amazon.com In related news, SVP David Zapolsky sold 9,258 shares of the firm’s stock in a transaction on Monday, August 24th. The stock was sold at an average price of $259.77, for a total value of $2,404,950.66. Following the completion of the sale, the senior vice president owned 41,190 shares of the company’s stock, valued at $10,699,926.30. This trade represents a 18.35% decrease in their ownership of the stock. The sale was disclosed in a legal filing with the SEC, which is available through this link. The transaction was executed under a pre-arranged Rule 10b5-1 trading plan. Also, VP Shelley Reynolds sold 2,343 shares of the firm’s stock in a transaction on Friday, August 21st. The stock was sold at an average price of $259.01, for a total value of $606,860.43. Following the completion of the sale, the vice president directly owned 119,780 shares of the company’s stock, valued at $31,024,217.80. The trade was a 1.92% decrease in their position. Additional details regarding this sale are available in the official SEC disclosure. The transaction was executed under a pre-arranged Rule 10b5-1 trading plan. In the last quarter, insiders sold 70,589 shares of company stock worth $18,314,015. Corporate insiders own 8.90% of the company’s stock. Amazon.com Stock Performance Shares of NASDAQ:AMZN opened at $266.43 on Monday. The company has a current ratio of 1.03, a quick ratio of 0.87 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.23. The company has a market cap of $2.87 trillion, a price-to-earnings ratio of 21.43, a price-to-earnings-growth ratio of 1.77 and a beta of 1.45. Amazon.com, Inc. has a 12 month low of $196.00 and a 12 month high of $287.20. The company has a 50-day moving average price of $251.62 and a 200-day moving average price of $240.67.
Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN – Get Free Report) last announced its quarterly earnings results on Thursday, July 30th. The e-commerce giant reported $5.75 earnings per share (EPS) for the quarter, beating analysts’ consensus estimates of $1.82 by $3.93. The company had revenue of $200.61 billion for the quarter, compared to the consensus estimate of $197.03 billion. Amazon.com had a return on equity of 18.00% and a net margin of 17.44%.Amazon.com’s revenue was up 19.6% compared to the same quarter last year. During the same quarter in the previous year, the business earned $1.68 EPS. As a group, equities analysts anticipate that Amazon.com, Inc. will post 8.05 EPS for the current year.
Analysts Set New Price Targets AMZN has been the subject of a number of research reports. JPMorgan Chase & Co. increased their target price on shares of Amazon.com from $330.00 to $365.00 and gave the stock an “overweight” rating in a research report on Friday, July 31st. BMO Capital Markets reiterated an “outperform” rating and set a $360.00 price objective (up from $355.00) on shares of Amazon.com in a research note on Tuesday, July 28th. Needham & Company LLC reissued a “buy” rating and issued a $300.00 price target on shares of Amazon.com in a report on Friday, July 31st. Mizuho set a $330.00 price objective on Amazon.com and gave the stock an “outperform” rating in a report on Friday, July 31st. Finally, UBS Group set a $318.00 target price on Amazon.com and gave the company a “buy” rating in a research note on Friday, July 31st. One research analyst has rated the stock with a Strong Buy rating, fifty-six have issued a Buy rating and two have issued a Hold rating to the company’s stock. According to MarketBeat.com, the stock has an average rating of “Moderate Buy” and an average target price of $323.09.
Check Out Our Latest Research Report on AMZN
Amazon.com Profile (Free Report)
Amazon.com, Inc is a diversified technology and retail company best known for its e-commerce marketplace and broad portfolio of consumer and enterprise services. Founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994 and headquartered in Seattle, Washington, the company launched as an online bookseller and expanded into a global retail platform that sells products directly to consumers and provides a marketplace for third-party sellers. Over time Amazon has grown beyond retail into areas including cloud computing, digital media, devices and logistics.
Key businesses and offerings include Amazon’s online marketplace and fulfillment services, the Amazon Prime membership program (which bundles expedited shipping with streaming and other benefits), Amazon Web Services (AWS) which supplies on-demand cloud computing and storage to businesses and public-sector customers, and a range of content and advertising services such as Prime Video and Amazon Advertising.
See Also Five stocks we like better than Amazon.com Strike a Balance Between Growth and Stability With These 3 Names Ready to Rally Rubrik’s AI Security Bet Could Power the Next Leg Higher Apple’s Foldable iPhone Could Be a Catalyst, But Not a Cure-All Snowflake Is Up Nearly 50% in 2026—What Are Short Sellers Betting Against? Want to see what other hedge funds are holding AMZN? Visit HoldingsChannel.com to get the latest 13F filings and insider trades for Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN – Free Report).
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SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Amazon Ads announces First Day Ready, a multi-phase brand partnership campaign developed by Brand Innovation Lab, the creative arm of Amazon Ads, that connects brands to Gen Z students heading to college.The campaign brings together brand sponsors — Gatorade, Michael Kors, SharkNinja — each paired with an influencer ambassador across shoppable video, custom brand experiences, creator content, and a campus block party culminating in a concert presented by Amazon Music."B.
Key Takeaways Amazon's Prime membership grew double digits, with same-day and overnight deliveries up more than 40%.Prime Video's expanded NBA slate and originals give subscribers more reasons to renew memberships.Amazon's sales rose 20% excluding currency effects, while advertising revenues climbed 26% to $19.8 billion. Amazon (AMZN - Free Report) enters the back half of 2026 with fresh momentum behind its Prime ecosystem, as recent programming and delivery announcements reinforce the loyalty engine underpinning the stock's retail narrative. On Aug. 13, 2026, Prime Video unveiled its full 2026-27 NBA on Prime schedule, its second season under the 11-year media rights agreement, featuring five weeks of Emirates NBA Cup doubleheaders, a Black Friday game, the SoFi Play-In Tournament in April 2027, and — for the first time — an exclusive presentation of the Eastern Conference Finals. This expands on a slate that already includes WNBA coverage and a growing pipeline of Amazon MGM Studios originals extending into 2027, giving subscribers fresh reasons to renew.
The strategy is already translating into subscriber traction. In its second-quarter 2026 earnings report, released July 30, Amazon disclosed double-digit year-over-year growth in Prime membership, alongside a more than 40% increase in items delivered same-day or overnight to Prime members in the first half of the year. Paid unit growth of 17% year over year further points to deepening customer engagement. Advertising revenues, increasingly tied to Prime Video's ad-supported tier and sponsored placements, climbed 26% to $19.8 billion, while Alexa+ expanded to four additional countries with users spending 40% more per order.
These trends helped drive overall net sales of $200.6 billion in the quarter, up 20% year over year excluding currency effects, with North America revenues rising 16% to $116.2 billion. For the third quarter, Amazon has guided to net sales between $197 billion and $202 billion. With grocery delivery expanding, live sports rights deepening, and membership growth holding steady, Amazon's Prime flywheel continues to strengthen the retail and advertising engines feeding its bottom line.
How Rivals Walmart and Netflix Compare on Membership LoyaltyWalmart (WMT - Free Report) and Netflix (NFLX - Free Report) offer useful benchmarks for Amazon's membership-driven strategy. Walmart reported double-digit membership fee revenue growth in its fiscal second quarter of 2027, with Walmart+ net adds reaching a quarterly high and Sam's Club also posting steady member gains. Netflix, meanwhile, delivered 13% year-over-year revenue growth in its second quarter of 2026, driven by membership growth, pricing increases, and expanding advertising revenues, even as Netflix stopped disclosing subscriber counts. Both Walmart and Netflix underscore that subscription loyalty, alongside Amazon's Prime ecosystem, remains a central battleground for U.S. consumer-facing companies in 2026.
AMZN’s Share Price Performance, Valuation & EstimatesAmazon shares have returned 15.4% in the year-to-date period compared with the Zacks Internet – Commerce industry and the Zacks Retail-Wholesale sector’s growth of 7.7% and 2.7%, respectively.
AMZN’s Year-to-date 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 23.35X, higher than the industry’s 22.13X. 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 $13.06 per share, indicating an 82.15% increase from the figure reported in the year-ago quarter.
Amazon currently carries a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy). You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.
Wall Street keeps punishing Amazon every time AI capex headlines hit, and one investor keeps buying the dip. The reason has nothing to do with quarterly earnings and everything to do with a number most analysts are not talking about.
I keep buying Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN | AMZN Price Prediction), and I do not plan to stop. Every time the market gets nervous about AI infrastructure spending and marks the stock down, I add more. That pattern is why I sleep fine holding a name currently trading at $266.43, even after a 17.55% run in the last month.
Here is what the discount is missing. AWS backlog now sits at $496 billion, growing triple digits year over year, and most AI capacity is contracted for at least five-year terms. Andy Jassy told the Street AWS is on pace to have double the power capacity by the end of 2027 that it had in 2025, and the lion’s share of that 2027 capacity is already reserved. That is contracted demand pulling forward supply.
Three Reasons My Buy Button Stays Active AWS is re-accelerating on a very large base. Segment revenue reached $42.23 billion in Q2 FY26, up 37% year over year, the fastest pace in 18 quarters, at a 39.4% operating margin. That is a $169 billion annualized run rate compounding faster than two years ago. Custom silicon drives growth. Amazon’s AI business and chips business each cleared a $25 billion annualized run rate at triple-digit growth, and Graviton is now used by 98% of the top 1,000 EC2 customers. Anthropic and OpenAI have made multi-year, multi-gigawatt commitments to Trainium. That moat deepens with every generation.
Advertising is quietly becoming one of the best businesses on the internet. Q2 ad revenue hit $19.809 billion, up 26% year over year, on the highest-intent retail traffic. Shoppers who click a sponsored prompt convert 48% more often and spend 21% more on average. That flows through at margins standalone retail cannot touch.
The balance sheet supports the spend. Debt-to-equity sits at 0.37, interest coverage at 35.2 times, cash at $78.21 billion. Trailing operating cash flow ran $139.51 billion. This company can fund the ~$200 billion 2026 capex plan without straining anything.
Why Not Microsoft or Alphabet Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) and Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL) are obvious hyperscaler alternatives. My money goes to Amazon because no other name stacks a $496 billion cloud backlog on top of a $70 billion trailing advertising business and the second-largest US grocery footprint, with over $150 billion in annual grocery gross merchandise sales. Amazon Now gross sales grew over 80% quarter over quarter. Worldwide paid units grew 17% year over year. That retail flywheel compounds alongside cloud in a way pure-play peers cannot replicate.
Capex Risk I Refuse to Dismiss Capex is real. It ran $54.208 billion in Q2 FY26, up 68.44% year over year. Trailing twelve-month free cash flow flipped to negative $7.6 billion. Roughly $200 billion more is planned for 2026, and all that money has to be turned into power, cooling, and networking by somebody (we profiled seven of those suppliers in a free report here: 7 Stocks Powering the AI Boom). What keeps me buying is the math Jassy laid out. Data centers monetize for 30-plus years after initial spend. Servers break even in a little less than three years on average and carry a useful life of at least five to six years. The capacity being built is already contracted. The spending is the thesis.
What Keeps the Buy Button Warm Jassy said AWS could plausibly become a trillion-dollar annual revenue business over time, with very appealing accompanying free cash flow and return on invested capital. This position works if the backlog converts, the chip business keeps compounding, and the retail flywheel keeps turning. All three are happening quarter after quarter. Every capex-driven drawdown is an invitation to own more of what comes on the other side.
Contact [email protected] for any questions or corrections.
AWS just committed a staggering sum to plant its flag in a sovereign AI market that could reshape the global cloud race, and Wall Street is still figuring out what it means for Amazon's already astronomical growth trajectory.
$5.3 Billion Saudi Region Commitment Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN | AMZN Price Prediction) disclosed that its first AWS Cloud Infrastructure Region in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia represents more than $5.3 billion (19.88 billion Saudi riyal) in planned cloud infrastructure investment. The figure, reiterated at the LEAP conference in Riyadh, tied to a Region first announced in March 2024 and now on track to launch in December 2026. It represents a multi-year capital commitment for a single geography.
What It Means The $5.3 billion outlay funds the buildout that will expand the AWS Global Infrastructure to 40 Regions worldwide. Alongside it, AWS and HUMAIN, a Public Investment Fund-owned company, will make up to 50 megawatts (MW) of capacity available in Saudi Arabia’s first AI Zone by 2028, provisioned with AWS’s Trainium chips and the latest NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA) AI infrastructure. That stack of power, silicon, and networking is where the AI capex story really lives, and we broke down seven suppliers riding the same buildout in a free AI infrastructure report. The commitment sits inside a much larger spending arc. AWS booked $42.2 billion in Q2 2026 revenue, up 36.7% year-over-year, and Amazon’s cash capex was $53.1 billion in Q2 alone. In that context, Saudi Arabia is one anchor project inside a global capacity race.
Market Reaction AMZN traded at $261 intraday on August 31, 2026, down 2.04% on the session from a prior close of $266.43. The Saudi announcement did not drive a distinct move against the broader market. Over the past month the stock has risen 17.55% from $226.65 on July 29, 2026, largely following the July 30, 2026 earnings release. Year to date, AMZN is up 15.43%.
Strategic Outlook The Saudi Region formalizes AWS’s push into a sovereign AI market that an IDC report commissioned by AWS sizes at an estimated $130 billion contribution to Saudi Arabia’s economy by 2030. HUMAIN’s ALLAM Arabic large language model will soon be available through Amazon Bedrock, and HUMAIN Fabric will be distributed via AWS Marketplace, giving Amazon a channel into Arabic-language enterprise AI. CEO Andy Jassy told investors AWS is a $169 billion annualized revenue run rate business with a backlog of $496 billion, growing triple digits year over year, and said he now believes AWS “will be at least double that and very possibly be a trillion dollar annual revenue business for us in time.” The Riyadh Region feeds that trajectory by locking in demand from customers including stc Group, Almosafer, and ZainTECH.
Bottom Line The $5.3 billion figure quantifies how much cash Amazon is willing to sink into one new sovereign geography to defend AWS’s lead as workloads shift from on-premises to cloud. Jassy noted that “85% of the global IT spend is still on-premises” and that most of our AI capacity these days is being contracted for at least five-year terms. For investors, the near-term catalyst is the December 2026 Region go-live, which converts announced capex into billable capacity heading into 2027.
Contact [email protected] for any questions or corrections.
Piper Sandler Backs Amazon With $320 Target as AWS Remains a Key Growth Engine Summary
Amazon’s cloud business remains central to the investment case, while its valuation and return on invested capital provide additional support for the bullish view
Amazon.com AMZN was in focus Monday after Piper Sandler maintained its Overweight view and $320 price target, pointing to AWS investment and the retailer's capital efficiency.
The firm said Amazon's return on invested capital averaged about 17% from 2018 through 2025, versus a projected 14% for 2026. Its latest 12-month figure was 12%, while the stock traded at about 21.34 times earnings and a PEG ratio of 0.24.
Piper Sandler's view centers on Amazon's spending priorities. The company has directed much of its capital budget toward AWS, which has been a key contributor to recent earnings growth. In July, Piper Sandler raised its target to $320 after Amazon's second-quarter results showed AWS revenue growth of 37% year over year.
Amazon is also expanding AWS capabilities through its planned purchase of DuckLabs, developer of the DuckDB database, while adding nearly 200 megawatts of wind capacity in Sweden.
Piper Sandler's stance keeps attention on AWS growth, capital spending and returns as key drivers for Amazon shares.
Disclosures I/we have no positions in any stocks mentioned, and have no plans to buy any new positions in the stocks mentioned within the next 72 hours.
Amazon and Alphabet both broke cloud growth records in Q2 while burning through historic levels of capital, but their funding strategies and margin runways point in starkly different directions for investors deciding which AI spending spree is actually worth backing.
