Amazon po uzavření trhu oznámí výsledky za 2. čtvrtletí; trh sleduje hlavně AWS a kapitálové výdaje. Odhady počítají s EPS 1,82 USD a tržbami 196,47 miliardy USD.
Amazon is set to announce its second-quarter earnings after the bell on Thursday.
Here's what analysts are expecting, according to estimates compiled by LSEG:
Earnings per share: $1.82 Revenue: $196.47 billion Wall Street is also looking at other key revenue numbers:
Amazon Web Services: $40.54 billion expected, according to StreetAccountAdvertising: $19.43 billion expected, according to StreetAccountInvestors are watching Amazon and the rest of the so-called hyperscalers' capital expenditures as the mood around massive investments in artificial intelligence has grown increasingly jittery. Alphabet shares sank last week after the company hiked its capex forecast for the year to as high as $205 billion.
On Thursday, Microsoft shares surged as much as 15% after the company reported better-than-expected earnings and reaffirmed its 2026 capex plans. Meta's stock tumbled 9%, meanwhile, after it gave a light revenue forecast for the current quarter, with its AI bets eating into its cash flow.
Amazon's capital expenditures reached $44.2 billion in the first quarter, up 77% from a year ago, and the figure is expected to creep higher in the second quarter to $49.3 billion, per FactSet data.
The company held steady on its February guidance that capex will hit roughly $200 billion for 2026. But several analysts are expecting Amazon to follow in the footsteps of Alphabet and lift its forecast for the year.
Read more CNBC tech newsMicrosoft beats Q4 cloud expectations as full-year Azure revenue tops $100 billionMeta's Reality Labs lost over $4.6 billion in second quarterMeta posts earnings miss, issues light revenue guidanceTim Cook's last earnings call comes at momentous time for Apple with stock at recordAnalysts at Morgan Stanley wrote in a research note earlier this month that the "ecosystem remains compute-constrained and urgency to spend remains high." They now expect Amazon's capex to reach $218 billion this year, and forecast budgets to keep rising through 2028, when capex could total $318 billion.
The analysts were also bullish on Amazon's cloud business, pointing to its "private lab deals" as a catalyst for "multi-year growth durability." Amazon has continued to deepen its cloud and chips partnerships with the leading AI providers OpenAI and Anthropic. In April, it struck a deal with Meta to supply the social networking giant with AWS Graviton chips.
"We also think AWS's access to almost all of the leading models, small/medium and customized models position it as a winner in a world where optimizing token cost per task is the key," Morgan Stanley analysts wrote.
Cloud growth will be in focus after Amazon's primary rivals both posted strong results. Google Cloud revenue jumped 82% year over year in the most recent quarter. Microsoft's Azure cloud revenue rose 43% during the fiscal fourth quarter.
AWS revenue is expected to rise about 31% from a year ago, according to StreetAccount, compared with 28% growth in the first quarter, which represented its fastest expansion in more than three years.
While Amazon continues to invest in AI, it has trimmed its corporate head count. The company held layoffs in its customer service and seller support divisions in recent months.
Amazon stock chart.
Last week, it announced job cuts in its artificial general intelligence unit, marking the latest reorganization of that group after Amazon installed a new AGI leader and the head of its AGI Lab announced his departure.
During the second quarter, Amazon hosted its annual Prime Day discount bonanza. The company moved up the event from its typical July time frame, citing a busy calendar marked by the World Cup and America's 250th anniversary of independence.
Mizuho analysts wrote in a Monday note that the timing shift could lead to a slowdown in Amazon's North America retail sales growth in the third quarter before they reaccelerate in the fourth quarter.
U.S. online spending across all retailers during Prime Day, which ran June 23 through June 26, grew about 9.3% year over year to $26.4 billion, according to Adobe. Amazon doesn't release sales figures from the event.
Evercore analysts described the event as "reasonably successful" in a note to clients earlier this week. Analysts at KeyBanc said their proprietary data showed Prime Week spending rose 41.7%, compared with 50.5% last year, indicating the event was "strong, but not as strong as last year."
Amazon stock is up about 3% year to date, while the S&P 500 has risen roughly 8%.
Americký e-shop a poskytovatel cloudové infrastruktury Amazon zveřejní své výsledky hospodaření za 2Q 2026 již dnes po uzavření amerických trhů. Přinášíme přehled toho nejdůležitějšího, co bude stát za pozornost.
Výnosy potáhne AWS i reklama Celkové výnosy by podle analytiků měly meziročně vzrůst o 17,5 % na 197,01 mld. USD, tedy do horní poloviny výhledu společnosti 194 až 199 mld. USD. Růst by měly táhnout divize AWS a reklamních služeb.
Odhady výnosů Amazonu ze 2Q dle divize
(mld. USD) Divize Konsensus 2Q 2025 Meziroční změna Online prodej (1P)
69,92 61,49 +14 % Služby pro prodejce třetích stran (3P)
46,15 40,35 +14 % Cloudové služby AWS
40,57 30,87 +31 % Reklamní služby
19,32 15,69 +23 % Služby související s předplatným 13,75 12,21 +13 % Kamenné obchody 5,87 5,60 +5 % Ostatní 1,66 1,50 +11 % Klíčovým tématem zůstává AWS Nejsledovanějším segmentem bude bezpochyby AWS, u kterého se očekává další zrychlení. Po 20% růstu výnosů ve 3Q 2025, 24 % ve 4Q a 28 % v 1Q 2026, trh očekává meziroční růst o 31 % na 40,57 mld. USD. Analytici z Wells Fargo očekávají dokonce zrychlení na +34 % meziročně, přičemž odhadují příspěvek Anthropicu k meziročnímu růstu AWS ve 2Q (oproti 1Q) dodatečnými ~400 bazickými body.
Pozornost si zaslouží také objem nezpracovaných zakázek. Management naposledy uvedl backlog AWS ve výši 364 mld. USD, a to bez následně uzavřené obrovské dohody s Anthropicem (>100 mld. USD). Vedle cloudu bude také stát za pozornost případný komentář k byznysu s vlastními čipy (Graviton a Trainium). Ten podle posledního komentáře ve výsledcích za 1Q dosahoval ročního tempa tržeb 20 mld. USD s trojciferným meziročním růstem.
Zisk na akcii bude pravděpodobně zkreslený přeceněním Anthropicu Trh odhaduje zisk na akcii ve výši 1,84 USD. Stejně jako ve výsledkovém reportu Alphabet za 2Q bude však zisk na akcii pravděpodobně zkreslený přeceněním podílu v Anthropicu. Již výsledky za 1Q zahrnovaly přecenění ve výši 16,8 mld. USD právě z tohoto podílu. Více vypovídající tak bude provozní zisk, který Amazon očekával v rozmezí 20 až 24 mld. USD. Trh odhaduje 23,61 mld. USD.
Kapitálové výdaje ve středu zájmu Amazon již avizoval, že letos plánuje proinvestovat zhruba 200 mld. USD napříč AI infrastrukturou, čipy, robotikou, logistickými aktivy i satelity na nízké oběžné dráze (v rámci Amazon LEO). Za samotný druhý kvartál očekávají analytici kapitálové výdaje 49,41 mld. USD. Bude tak zajímavé sledovat, zda Amazon ve stopách Alphabetu svůj letošní výhled kapitálových výdajů navýší.
Odvrácenou stranou investic je pokračující tlak na volné hotovostní toky, které ve výsledcích za 1Q za posledních dvanáct měsíců činily pouhých 1,23 mld. USD. Dá se tak očekávat, že stejně jako u Alphabetu se dostanou do záporných hodnot.
Představení společnosti Zajímá vás společnost Amazon? Přečtěte si první a druhý díl podrobného představení společnosti.
Akcie Amazon Akcie Amazon (AMZN) před výsledky posilují o 4,95 % na 237,86 USD.
Společnost Zoox, dceřiná společnost Amazonu vyvíjející autonomní vozidla, bude moci v USA během následujících dvou let komerčně nasadit až 2 500 vozů ročně. Americký Národní úřad pro bezpečnost silničního provozu (NHTSA) oznámil, že firmě udělí dočasnou výjimku umožňující rozšíření provozu, a to za podmínky posíleného a přizpůsobivého dohledového rámce, který se bude vyvíjet spolu s technologií Zoox.
Výjimka je pro Zoox zásadní, protože jeho vozidlo nemá volant ani pedály a umí jezdit obousměrně. Provozovatelé autonomních vozidel bez klasických ovládacích prvků potřebují federální schválení. Zoox si bezpečnost svého autonomního vozu certifikoval sám v roce 2022 a dříve už získal výjimku pro výzkumné a demonstrační účely. Firma aktuálně provozuje jízdy v Las Vegas a San Franciscu a testuje v několika dalších městech.
Waymo od Alphabetu, které trhu autonomních vozidel v USA dominuje, obdobné výjimky dosud nepotřebovalo, poněvadž jeho flotila stojí na běžných vozech s volantem a pedály. NHTSA zároveň pracuje na nových bezpečnostních požadavcích upravujících chování autonomních vozidel na silnici. Změny by mohly uvolnit cestu účelově konstruovaným vozům firem Zoox, Waymo a Tesla. Úřad chce odstranit byrokratické překážky v rámci širší snahy dostat autonomní vozy na silnice ve větších počtech.
Představení společnosti Zajímá vás společnost Amazon? Přečtěte si první a druhý díl podrobného představení společnosti.
Akcie Amazon Akcie Amazon (AMZN) v předburzovní fázi posilují o 3,69 % na 235,01 USD.
Amazon rozšířil roli Swamiho Sivasubramaniana, který nově vede „Agentic AI & Emerging Technologies“ a bude určovat AI strategii i technický směr v AWS. Zároveň firma omezuje práci na frontier modelech a víc se soustředí na AI aplikace a služby.
by Todd Bishop on Jul 29, 2026 at 4:38 pmJuly 29, 2026 at 4:50 pm
Swami Sivasubramanian on stage at AWS re:Invent in 2023, with a keynote slide behind him. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop) Amazon just broadened the role of Swami Sivasubramanian, the VP behind AWS’s agentic AI push, expanding and renaming his organization to include emerging technologies, and giving him a larger mandate to shape AI strategy and technical direction across the cloud division.
Sivasubramanian announced the change in a LinkedIn post on Wednesday, saying he will now lead the “Agentic AI & Emerging Technologies” organization, with an expanded title to match.
He described emerging technologies as “the work that doesn’t fit neatly into a team because it doesn’t exist yet.” It’s a type of work he’s done before, including formative roles with DynamoDB, now one of AWS’s most widely used databases, and Bedrock, the platform through which AWS customers access AI models from Anthropic, Meta, and others.
“When the industry is changing this quickly, it’s important to step back, pressure-test ideas, and see the big picture to help teams scale their impact,” he wrote.
Sivasubramanian’s agentic AI division has operated as a test case for running Amazon like a startup, with small teams shipping products in months that once took a year, as GeekWire reported in June.
He’ll continue overseeing the teams behind Kiro, Amazon Quick, and AWS Transform, while taking on new areas including neurosymbolic AI and a recently announced service called AWS Context, which builds a knowledge graph from a company’s existing data so AI agents can query it.
The expansion builds on moves already underway, including the hiring in May of former Microsoft security exec Shawn Bice to lead AWS’s Automated Reasoning Group, which uses mathematical techniques to verify that AI agents are doing what they’re supposed to do.
It also coincides with a broader reshuffling of Amazon’s AI strategy and teams.
Amazon laid off employees in its artificial general intelligence organization last week and confirmed the closure of its San Francisco AGI site, but noted that its frontier model research will continue under Pieter Abbeel, who joined Amazon through its acquisition of robotics startup Covariant.
Business Insider reported Monday that Amazon is winding down most of its in-house Nova foundation models, including its high-end Premier and Omni models, and concentrating engineering talent and computing resources on a smaller number of frontier efforts.
Sivasubramanian’s expanded role is separate from the AGI changes, and the two organizations operate independently of one another within Amazon. But the net effect is that Amazon is narrowing its work in frontier models while expanding its efforts in AI applications and services.
This mirrors a larger pattern across the industry, as big AI providers look to ensure the billions they’re sinking into chips and data centers pay off in customer outcomes and business growth.
Analytici čekají, že Amazon ve 2. čtvrtletí vykáže tržby 196,02 miliardy USD a zisk na akcii 1,82 USD. Firma zároveň očekává tržby 194 až 199 miliard USD.
Analysts expect the e-commerce giant to report Q2 revenue of $196.02 billion, up from $167.70 billion in last year’s Q2, according to data from Benzinga Pro.
The company has beaten analyst estimates for revenue in seven straight quarters and in nine of the last 10 quarters overall.
Analysts expect Amazon Q2 earnings per share of $1.82, up from $1.68 in last year’s Q2.
The Seattle-based company has beaten analyst estimates for earnings per share in nine of the last 10 quarters. Guidance calls for revenue to be between $194 billion and $199 billion. The company did not provide earnings per share guidance.
Amazon Analyst RatingsHere are some of the most recent analyst ratings on Amazon.com stock and their price targets:
UBS: Maintained Buy rating, lowered price target from $333 to $305 BMO Capital: Maintained Outperform rating, raised price target from $355 to $360 Mizuho: Maintained Outperform rating, lowered price target from $325 to $320 Wedbush: Maintained Outperform rating, with $293 price target Wells Fargo: Maintained Overweight rating, raised price target from $313 to $322 Amazon Q2: Key Items to WatchAmazon posted double-digit revenue growth of 17% year-over-year in the first quarter, with the main segments of North America (+12%), International (+19%) and Amazon Web Services (+28%) all seeing double-digit growth.
AWS has been a standout performer in recent quarters, also posting revenue growth of 24% in the fourth quarter. The company said AWS growth in the first quarter was the fastest growth in 15 quarters.
The cloud segment is getting closer to passing International revenue and becoming the second-largest revenue driver each quarter.
AWS will be a key focus area for investors and analysts.
Another key will be any commentary on AI spending and AI monetization as the big technology companies look to show that their large capex is paying off in areas like revenue and margins.
Prime Video Bets On Blockbusters And Live SportsThe company’s Prime Video segment saw "Project Hail Mary" as a box office hit in March and likely into Q2.
"Masters of the Universe" didn’t perform as hot in theaters, with $113.8 million in global box office.
The hit show "Off Campus" saw huge viewership in the month of May, as did the final season of "The Boys."
NBA and NBA Playoffs coverage by Prime Video in April could also help boost overall advertising revenue for the company with live sports content being a key driver for this area.
Amazon is one of four Magnificent Seven stocks reporting this week and is also a key component of the S&P 500, Nasdaq 100 and Dow Jones Industrial Average. Here is Amazon’s place in three ETFs that track those indexes:
Strong earnings and guidance, along with a positive reaction to capex by investors, could provide a boost for those ETFs and the overall market.
Price ActionAmazon stock is up 0.4% to $231.82 on Wednesday versus a 52-week trading range of $196.00 to $278.56. The stock price is up 2.4% year-to-date in 2026.
Photo: Shutterstock
Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs
Amazon.com Inc (NASDAQ:AMZN) is set to report its second quarter 2026 results on July 30, with UBS lowering its price target to $305 from $333 while maintaining a ‘Buy’ rating as it expects continued strength from Amazon Web Services and improving e-commerce profitability.
The UBS analysts wrote that the price target reduction reflects expectations for higher capital expenditures in 2027 and beyond due to rising component costs and increased demand for infrastructure.
The analysts also adjusted near-term AWS revenue expectations after moving OpenAI’s initial use of Amazon’s Trainium chips from the fourth quarter of 2026 into early 2027, shifting approximately $3 billion in revenue out of this year.
Despite the near-term adjustment, UBS highlighted AWS as a key driver of its bullish outlook, noting that it believes the market is underestimating the cloud unit’s backlog and revenue growth potential in the second half of 2026 and into 2027.
UBS forecasts AWS revenue growth of 36% in 2026, ahead of the Street estimate of 31%, and expects growth of 48% in 2027 compared with consensus expectations of 30%.
The analysts wrote that its largest divergence from consensus remains Amazon’s 2027 operating income outlook, which UBS estimates will be approximately 49% above current Street expectations.
UBS’s investment thesis is centered on continued AWS growth acceleration as Amazon expands capacity, alongside potential market share gains in e-commerce driven by improving service levels, including broader same-day delivery and increased investment in groceries.
The firm also expects improving unit economics to support faster margin expansion in Amazon’s retail business, as growth in units sold continues to outpace cost growth. In addition, UBS pointed to Amazon’s Prime Video advertising opportunity, highlighting the potential for higher-margin revenue growth as the service scales globally through partnerships and live sports offerings.
UBS maintained its ‘Buy’ rating, writing that Amazon’s valuation remains attractive, with the stock trading at around 14 times its updated 2027 earnings estimate. The firm argued that a premium asset such as Amazon should not trade at a discount to the broader market multiple.
The revised $305 price target, which implies upside from current levels of about $228, is based on a 30 times price-to-free cash flow multiple applied to UBS’s estimate of $109.9 billion in free cash flow from the third quarter of 2027 through the second quarter of 2028.
Amazon čeká po výsledcích za 2. čtvrtletí prudký pohyb, protože trh sleduje hlavně růst AWS a dopad masivních investic do AI. Opce naznačují zhruba 6% pohyb oběma směry, tedy asi 15 USD.
Amazon stock NASDAQ:AMZN could swing about $15 after its July 30 earnings as investors decide whether accelerating artificial-intelligence demand is beginning to justify the company’s unprecedented infrastructure spending.
Options prices imply a move of roughly 6% in either direction from about $231, creating a potential range near $217 to $246. The shares are approximately flat in 2026 and 17% below their May high.
The options market is signalling uncertainty because investors must judge growth and spending together, rather than relying on the usual combination of an earnings beat and upbeat revenue guidance alone this quarter.
Wall Street expects second-quarter revenue of about $196.75 billion and AWS sales near $40.49 billion.
Yet headline growth may not decide the reaction.
Amazon must show that cloud revenue is accelerating without margins collapsing under a capital-expenditure programme expected to reach $200 billion this year.
AWS revenue grew 28% to $37.6 billion in the first quarter, its fastest expansion in 15 quarters. Visible Alpha expects second-quarter sales around $40.5 billion, implying growth above 30%.
“AWS is the story, and AI is driving AWS,” Morningstar senior equity analyst Dan Romanoff wrote ahead of the report.
He said investors should focus on growth, backlog, capacity additions and utilisation, while warning that depreciation could weigh on cloud margins and Amazon’s overall profitability.
Bank of America raised its AWS growth forecast to 33% from 31%, while estimating total revenue of $198.8 billion and operating income of $24.1 billion.
KeyBanc analyst Justin Patterson expects AWS growth near 31% through 2026 and 2027 and raised his Amazon target to $335.
Goldman Sachs analyst Eric Sheridan, who also carries a $335 target, forecasts approximately 33% growth this year and 35% in 2027.
Growth of 32% to 33% would support the bull case. A result around 30% may merely meet expectations, while anything below that could disappoint if profitability also weakens.
Amazon’s trailing operating cash flow increased 30% to $148.5 billion in the first quarter, but free cash flow plunged to $1.2 billion from $25.9 billion.
The company attributed the decline mainly to property and equipment purchases supporting AI.
Wedbush analysts expect “continued heavy investment” in Amazon’s chips and satellite-internet network. Another spending increase could therefore eclipse an otherwise strong report.
AWS margin is critical. Visible Alpha expects 33.8%, down from 37.7% in the first quarter but above 32.9% a year earlier. Estimates range from 30.9% to 38.2%, illustrating uncertainty over the expansion’s cost.
Investors may tolerate a margin near 34% if AWS growth reaches 32% or better.
A steeper contraction alongside higher capital spending would suggest Amazon is purchasing cloud growth at an increasingly heavy price.
Expected second-quarter earnings should not be compared directly with first-quarter earnings of $2.78 a share.
That result included a $16.8 billion pre-tax gain on Amazon’s Anthropic investment.
Amazon guided for second-quarter sales of $194 billion to $199 billion and operating income of $20 billion to $24 billion, assuming Prime Day occurred during the period.
Bank of America expects only a “modest” retail lift from the event.
The larger issue is whether Prime Day pulled purchases forward, weakening the September quarter.
Analysts expect third-quarter revenue guidance broadly between $200.5 billion and $205.5 billion.
Amazon could outperform the implied range if AWS grows 32% to 33%, margins hold near 34%, operating income exceeds guidance and spending remains controlled.
The shares could fall despite a headline beat if cloud growth disappoints, margins contract sharply, capital expenditure rises or third-quarter guidance is soft.
Amazon čeká silnější růst AWS: analytici nyní odhadují meziroční růst tržeb na 31–33 %, Bank of America až na 33 %. V prvním čtvrtletí AWS rostl o 28 %.
Amazon (AMZN -0.19%) is set to report its second-quarter earnings on Thursday, July 30, and expectations are high, especially for the AWS cloud services business. For example, analysts at Bank of America recently raised their AWS growth forecast to 33% year-over-year, specifically calling out demand from Anthropic and OpenAI workloads.
This would be a significant acceleration from the 28% growth rate the commerce and tech giant reported in the first quarter and would likely be taken as a positive sign by investors. But I'm going to make the bold prediction that even these lofty expectations aren't enough -- in fact, I predict that AWS revenue growth could come in at 35% or more.
Image source: Getty Images.
Amazon's second-quarter earnings: What the market expects As mentioned, Amazon reports earnings on Thursday (after the market's close), and analysts expect about $197 billion in total revenue and $1.82 in earnings per share, which would be 8% higher than a year ago.
When it comes to AWS, expectations vary depending on who you ask, but virtually all analysts expect to see acceleration compared to the first quarter. Most reputable analyst forecasts expect AWS revenue growth in the 31%-33% range.
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So, why am I predicting an even better number? For one thing, I agree that the demand from Anthropic and OpenAI is likely to be a big driver of second-quarter growth. And AWS revenue growth has already been accelerating -- in fact, the 28% revenue growth rate AWS posted in the first quarter was the fastest in nearly four years.
The most important number isn't AWS top line growth Don't get me wrong. If AWS posts a blowout number, it could make or break the market's reaction to Amazon's earnings report. But the AWS growth all by itself isn't the full story -- it's how efficiently Amazon is spending its money to achieve said growth.
In February, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy guided for $200 billion in capex for 2026, most of which will be spent on AI infrastructure. And while Amazon can certainly afford to spend this money, the big question on investors' minds has been whether it will produce an adequate return for the company. In other words, will the growth (and profits) that Amazon produces justify such a large price tag?
To put it mildly, accelerating AWS growth would be a big step in the right direction, showing investors that the juice is worth the squeeze. And if AWS can report better-than-expected growth without an alarming increase in projected capex, it would be even better. But when the earnings report is released, it will be important to pay close attention to AWS's growth and the cost of that growth.
Amazon prodal dluhopisy za 25 miliard USD, aby financoval rozšiřování AI infrastruktury. Na rok 2026 plánuje kapitálové výdaje ve výši 200 miliard USD.
In 2026, one of the dominant investment themes is concern about how much large tech companies like Amazon (AMZN -0.19%) are spending on building artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure. That concern is reflected in the Amazon stock price; as of this writing, shares are up less than 2% so far this year.
Amazon's recent bond sale and capital expenditure plans, however, suggest that the company has a far different concern than most of the market.
Andy Jassy, Amazon (AMZN), CEO. Image source: Amazon.
Ballooning spending In early July, Amazon sold $25 billion worth of bonds to continue fueling the build-out of AI infrastructure. In addition, its capital expenditures for 2026 are projected at $200 billion, a significant increase from the $131 billion spent in 2025. As a point of comparison, Meta Platforms expects its capital expenditures to fall between $125 billion and $145 billion, while Alphabet plans to spend between $195 billion and $205 billion.
The worry is that the spending may take years to yield any meaningful return. The more extreme concern is that AI will become a money pit with almost no return, and that large tech companies have ultimately wasted years of time, resources, and capital on it.
That said, Amazon clearly has a different fear.
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Missing out In tech, history is littered with missed opportunities. One classic example is when Blockbuster could have bought Netflix in 2000 for $50 million. Blockbuster went on to file for bankruptcy in 2010, while Netflix today is worth more than $291 billion.
That fear of missing out or making one critical mistake, like not investing enough in building AI infrastructure, can help explain why Amazon is spending so much. It also explains why there may seem to be a disconnect: Investors worry it is spending too much, while Amazon fears it's not spending enough.
In his letter to shareholders in April, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy addressed the spending head-on:
AI will reinvent every customer experience, and there will be a slew of new experiences only possible because of AI. I've followed the public debate on whether this technology is overhyped, whether we're in 'a bubble,' and if the margins and ROIC will be appealing. My strong conviction, at least for Amazon, is that the answers are no, no, and yes.
Jassy went on to say, "AI is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity where the current growth is unprecedented and the future growth even bigger."
Jassy could be right, as this may still just be the early stages before the full AI growth story takes shape, and Amazon clearly doesn't want to miss out. The trade-off for having the patience to let those investments pay off is that Amazon may lag the S&P 500 (^GSPC +0.21%), as it has this year.
Amazon může při výsledcích za 30. července vykázat výrazný účetní zisk z podílu v Anthropic, který Bank of America označuje za hlavní tahoun reportu. Hodnota podílu by mohla prudce vzrůst po IPO Anthropic při valuaci kolem 965 miliard USD.
It's Amazon's (AMZN -0.19%) turn to step up to the earnings podium. The online retailer founded by Jeff Bezos is expected to show strong growth in its cloud computing business, Amazon Web Services, and is likely to increase its planned $200 billion capital expenditure budget as memory and storage products become more expensive.
I'm fully expecting Amazon to post solid second-quarter earnings on Thursday, July 30. But considering that investors seem to have the yips right now about spiraling data center costs, I expect the stock to drop due to capital expenditure growth and shrinking free cash flow. Yet there's one item that certainly will cause investors to smile: the company's massive gains from its stake in the start-up AI company Anthropic.
Amazon was an early investor in Anthropic, the company behind Claude, and put $13 billion in with the option to invest $20 billion more. That $13 billion stake is now worth much more, given that Anthropic is considering going public at a valuation of around $1 trillion. In a research note, Bank of America analysts point to Amazon's stake in Anthropic as a significant driver in its upcoming earnings report, generating a strong mark-to-market gain.
Let's see how Amazon's stake in Anthropic has grown, and what investors should be looking for in Amazon's Q2 update.
Amazon founder and executive chairman Jeff Bezos. Image source: Amazon.
Amazon is winning big with Anthropic Amazon's investment in Anthropic includes an initial $8 billion investment in 2024, followed by another $5 billion in 2026. Published reports indicate that Amazon has 21% stake in the AI company.
However, at the end of the first quarter, Amazon valued its Anthropic stake at $74.2 billion -- $42.2 billion in convertible notes and $32 billion in nonvoting preferred stock. That would imply Anthropic had a value at that time of about $353.3 billion.
Last month, Anthropic filed a confidential IPO with the Securities and Exchange Commission that places Anthropic's value at $965 billion. That would push the value of Amazon's 21% stake to $202.6 billion.
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Putting Amazon's gains into perspective In the first quarter, Amazon reported net income of $30.25 billion -- a solid number, with much of that coming from its fast-growing Amazon Web Services. But it could be looking at a much larger gain -- on paper -- in this quarter just from its Anthropic stake, which appears set to increase by $128.4 billion in a single quarter.
That would certainly take the sting out of any dip in Amazon's stock price post-earnings. Big tech stocks have been hammered so far this week on fears of overspending on data centers and AI infrastructure, with Alphabet stock dropping 6% post-earnings after it raised its capex spending from $185 billion to $200 billion. Tesla fell even further after reporting a negative free cash flow of $1.1 billion for the quarter.
Amazon may suffer the same fate when it reports earnings. But investors who focus only on capex will miss the bigger picture. Anthropic's rapid growth is creating tremendous value for Amazon, and in the July 30 earnings report, investors may learn that its stake in the AI start-up is one of its most valuable assets.
Bank of America is an advertising partner of Motley Fool Money. Patrick Sanders has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Alphabet, Amazon, and Tesla. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
Jeff Bezos řekl, že vlastní čipový byznys Amazonu se rýsuje jako jeho další pilíř vedle Marketplace, Prime a AWS. Amazon do AI čipů Trainium a Inferentia investuje už přes deset let.
by John Cook on Jul 28, 2026 at 9:33 amJuly 28, 2026 at 9:33 am
Amazon’s next pillar could be built on a foundation of silicon.
In a new interview with Fortune, Amazon founder and Executive Chair Jeff Bezos says the company’s custom chip business is on track to become one of Amazon’s most durable businesses, placing it alongside Marketplace, Prime, and Amazon Web Services as a core pillar of the company.
“A few of our offerings have become durable pillars, things like Marketplace and Prime and AWS,” Bezos told Fortune. “What I see right now is that our chips business, our silicon business, is lining up to be our next pillar.”
The comments offer one of Bezos’ clearest public endorsements yet of Amazon’s push to design its own chips for artificial intelligence, an increasingly important strategy as demand for AI computing soars and companies look for alternatives to Nvidia’s dominant processors.
More than a decade of investment Amazon has invested heavily in custom silicon through Annapurna Labs, the Israeli chip startup it acquired in 2015. The company now develops its own AI chips under the Trainium and Inferentia brands, designed to train and run large language models while reducing costs for customers using Amazon Web Services.
AWS has positioned the chips as a lower-cost alternative for AI developers. AWS has positioned the chips as a lower-cost alternative for AI developers. Anthropic trains and runs its Claude models on Trainium, and OpenAI has committed to consume about 2 gigawatts of Trainium capacity, ramping in 2027.
The company disclosed revenue for its in-house data center chips for the first time earlier this year, and since then its Trainium, Graviton, and Nitro chips have grown to a combined annual run rate of more than $20 billion. Amazon has been pouring billions of dollars into AI infrastructure, including new data centers and custom networking hardware.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has repeatedly argued that demand for AI computing will remain strong for years, making investments in chips, servers, networking equipment, and power generation essential to the company’s long-term growth.
In an earnings release earlier this year, Jassy signaled plans to pour a record $200 billion in capital expenditures across Amazon in 2026, citing “seminal opportunities like AI, chips, robotics, and low earth orbit satellites.”
The real potential for Amazon’s chips business could come in going beyond the walls of its own data centers. Jassy wrote in his annual letter to shareholders this year that it’s “quite possible” Amazon will sell racks of its internally developed chips to third parties in the future.
Amazon’s fourth pillar? This discussion about Amazon’s “pillars” goes back to Bezos’ 2014 letter to shareholders, where he described four characteristics of what he called a “dreamy” business: “Customers love it, it can grow to very large size, it has strong returns on capital, and it’s durable in time — with the potential to endure for decades.”
AWS, Marketplace, and Prime are considered the first three pillars. The question of what could become Amazon’s “fourth pillar” has been debated for more than a decade, with areas including shipping and logistics and Alexa cited as contenders in the past.
The company’s big bet on silicon also was emphasized by Jassy in the Fortune piece. He told the magazine that chips are often the key to computing. “The growth in AI has been so significant, but we have a chips business that we built over the last decade here that is growing very quickly,” he said.
The profile appeared alongside Fortune’s release of its 2026 Global 500 ranking, which placed Amazon at No. 1 for the first time, ending Walmart’s 12-year run as the world’s largest company by revenue after Amazon surpassed $700 billion in annual sales, as reported previously.
Walmart fell to No. 2, followed by State Grid of China, UnitedHealth Group, and Saudi Aramco. The magazine reports that Amazon is on pace to be the first trillion dollar company by revenue.
Amazon reports Q2 2026 earnings on Thursday afternoon. Check back with GeekWire for coverage.
Rogers Communications a Prime Video uzavřely 12letou sublicenční dohodu, která od sezóny 2026-27 dá Prime Video exkluzivní práva na středeční noční zápasy NHL v Kanadě. Součástí jsou i vybrané série play off Stanley Cupu.
Item 1 of 2 The Rogers Building, the green-topped corporate campus of Canadian media conglomerate Rogers Communications is seen in downtown Toronto, Ontario, Canada July 9, 2022. REUTERS/Chris Helgren/File Photo
[1/2]The Rogers Building, the green-topped corporate campus of Canadian media conglomerate Rogers Communications is seen in downtown Toronto, Ontario, Canada July 9, 2022. REUTERS/Chris Helgren/File Photo Purchase Licensing Rights, opens new tab
July 28 (Reuters) - Rogers Communications (RCIb.TO), opens new tab and Amazon.com's (AMZN.O), opens new tab Prime Video on Monday signed a 12-year sublicensing agreement granting the streaming platform exclusive rights to broadcast Wednesday night national NHL games in Canada beginning with the 2026-27 season.
The deal also grants Prime Video exclusive rights to select Stanley Cup playoff series and expands its NHL offering in Canada, where Rogers last year renewed national NHL media rights through the 2037-38 season.
The Reuters Inside Track newsletter is your essential guide to global sports news. Sign up here.
Here are more details:
The package includes at least 26 national regular-season games annually, starting September 30, 2026.
The agreement comes as streaming platforms invest heavily in live sports rights, one of the few categories of programming that continues to draw large real-time audiences.
Sportsnet will retain exclusive English-language rights to more than 500 national NHL games per season, including most playoff coverage.
It builds on Rogers' broader 12-year NHL national media-rights renewal covering the 2026-27 to 2037-38 seasons.
Rogers is one of Canada's largest sports media companies, with major sports broadcasting rights and ownership stakes in leading professional franchises.
Financial terms of the sublicensing deal were not disclosed.
Reporting by Rashika Singh in Bengaluru; Editing by Tasim Zahid
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Amazon před výsledky za Q1 vykazuje silný růst: tržby v Q1 stouply o 16,6 % na 181,52 mld. USD a provozní marže dosáhla rekordu 13,1 %. AWS rostl o 28 % na 37,6 mld. USD.
Amazon’s (NASDAQ:AMZN | AMZN Price Prediction) setup heading into July 30 earnings looks compelling. The company trades at roughly the same multiple as the S&P 500, yet the business is compounding across four segments at double-digit rates while its cloud franchise reaccelerates. Wall Street analysts give the stock 47 buys, 15 strong buys, 4 holds, and zero sells at an average price target of $313.13, implying 32.25% upside from its $232.11 price. Here are 3 of the biggest reasons to buy Amazon stock today:
Reason #1: Amazon Offers Above-Market Growth at a Market-Level P/E AMZN trades at a forward P/E of 27, roughly in line with the broad market. Shares are up just 0.56% year to date despite Q1 revenue growth of 16.6% YoY to $181.52B, an operating margin that hit 13.1% (a company record), and Q1 EPS of $2.78 versus $1.73 expected. Investors are essentially paying market-multiple prices for above-market growth. Polymarket puts odds of an earnings beat at 95.2%.
Reason #2: AWS Is Growing at Its Fastest Rate in 15 Quarters AWS printed $37.6 billion at 28% YoY growth, the fastest in 15 quarters, on a $150 billion run rate. The custom-silicon stack crossed a $20 billion annual run rate with triple-digit growth, and AWS ended Q1 with a $364 billion backlog. Anthropic committed over $100 billion post-quarter, on top of Trainium commitments totaling over $225 billion.
Reason #3: Advertising and Retail Add Two More Growth Engines Advertising is now a $70B+ TTM business growing 22-24%, Stores unit growth reached 15%, the highest since COVID lockdowns, and grocery gross sales topped $150 billion in 2025. Q2 guidance calls for net sales of $194B to $199B and operating income of $20B to $24B.
Amazon Is Funding Its AI Buildout With Operating Cash Flow Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) trades at a nearly identical P/E of 28 but lacks Amazon’s advertising and retail flywheels, and MSFT’s Q3 capex hit $30.88 billion, up 84% YoY.
Act now: the analyst who called NVIDIA in 2010 just named his top 10 AI stocks — and Amazon didn't make the cut. Grab the names FREE today.
Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL) grew Cloud 82% in Q2 2026, faster than AWS, but produced negative $5.86 billion of free cash flow and raised roughly $70 billion in equity and debt to fund the buildout. Amazon generated $26.03 billion of Q1 operating cash flow, up 53%, funding its AI buildout from the P&L.
Why Amazon’s $200 Billion Spending Plan Should Pay Off Amazon’s enormous AI investment program is the primary risk heading into Thursday’s Q2 report. The company spent $43.2 billion in Q1 cash capex, and prediction markets are pricing 95% odds of 2026 outlays above $200 billion.
However, AWS ran at a 37.7% operating margin in Q1, Trainium is booked with $225 billion in commitments, and Andy Jassy told investors, “We have high confidence this will be monetized well, as we already have customer commitments for a substantial portion of it and that it will yield compelling operating margins and ROIC.” Thursday’s report will show whether those investments can sustain faster growth without sacrificing Amazon’s newly established margin gains.
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Amazon přestavuje AI strategii a utlumuje většinu vlastních modelů Nova včetně Premier, Omni, Reel a Canvas. Zaměřuje se na nový frontier model pod vedením Frontier Model Research (FMR).
Peter DeSantis, Amazon's SVP of Foundational AI Models, Custom Silicon, and Quantum Computing Bloomberg/Getty Images Amazon is overhauling its AI strategy, winding down many in-house models, reorganizing teams, and focusing engineers on a new strategy to compete at the frontier, according to people familiar with the matter.
The changes follow layoffs in Amazon's Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI, organization last week and the shutdown of AGI Lab, a research group it created in 2024 after hiring most of the team behind AI startup Adept.
The restructuring suggests Amazon is refocusing its AI strategy. Rather than investing across a number of text, image, and video models, the company is concentrating engineering talent and scarce computing resources on its highest priorities.
"KTLO" Amazon has begun deprecating most of its in-house flagship Nova models, including the high-end Premier and Omni models, Reel video-generation model, and Canvas image-generation model, according to people familiar with the matter.
Some Amazon employees described these models as operating in "KTLO," short for "keep the lights on," an engineering term for software that remains supported for existing customers but is no longer a major development priority.
FMRAccording to the people familiar with the matter, resources have increasingly moved away from the existing Nova models and toward a new frontier-model effort led by researcher Pieter Abbeel, who came to Amazon through the acquisition of AI robotics startup Covariant. Known internally as Frontier Model Research, or FMR, the initiative has become a top priority this year.
Under that effort, Amazon is developing a new flagship foundation model that is expected to debut at this year's re:Invent annual conference, which typically happens in the fall.
An Amazon spokesperson told Business Insider the company has long supported AI models in production for extended periods because customers depend on them, and said Amazon remains committed to investing in frontier models.
"AI models remain one of the most important things we're working on, and that hasn't changed," the spokesperson said. "As with any AI portfolio, we continually evolve our model lineup based on what customers need, and we always provide customers clear guidance and migration paths as models advance."
Job cuts and departuresThe organizational change does not necessarily mean Amazon is abandoning Nova altogether. The remaining Nova portfolio includes the Nova 2 Sonic and Nova 2 Lite foundation models, Nova Forge, a service for building and customizing models, and Nova Act, Amazon's AI agent technology. Indeed, the new model that FMR is developing could emerge under the Nova brand.
Instead, the shift reflects a broader reorganization of Amazon's AI efforts that has unfolded over the past year.
Amazon created its AGI organization in 2023 to build foundation models and other technologies capable of powering future AI products across the company. Rohit Prasad, a longtime Alexa executive, led the organization until he departed in December 2025.
The AGI organization oversaw several specialized groups. One was AGI Lab, which Amazon established in 2024 after hiring AI startup Adept's cofounders and licensing its technology. Led by Adept cofounder David Luan, the lab focused on long-term AI research. Luan left Amazon in February, and the company shut down the AGI Lab last week as part of the latest reorganization.
Separately, Frontier Model Research was created within the AGI organization to develop Amazon's next generation of frontier AI models. After Prasad's departure, Amazon tapped Abbeel to lead the group. People familiar with the transition said FMR has since become the organization's primary focus.
DeSantis narrows the focusThe broader AGI organization was also reorganized. In December, Amazon placed it under senior vice president Peter DeSantis, combining it with the company's silicon development and quantum computing organizations.
People familiar with the transition said DeSantis has pursued a more focused AI strategy than his predecessor. Under Prasad, Amazon pursued multiple model families spanning text, image, and video generation. DeSantis, however, has concentrated Amazon's engineering talent and computing resources on a smaller number of frontier-model efforts, they said.
Employees said they have received little guidance about the long-term future of Nova models, fueling uncertainty across the organization.
The layoffs surprised many employees, the people said, because frontier model researchers had long been among Amazon's most prized technical talent. Employees said AGI also operated differently from the rest of the company, maintaining separate leveling and compensation systems to compete more aggressively for AI talent.
The changes mark a major shift in Amazon's AI ambitions. Just last year, AWS used its re:Invent conference to unveil Nova Omni 2 as its flagship multimodal reasoning model. In 2023, CEO Andy Jassy personally championed AGI as the team that would build Amazon's most ambitious foundation models, prompting the creation of six new research groups.
Less than three years later, the organization is retiring parts of its flagship Nova lineup and reorganizing around a new frontier model effort.
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Eugene is Business Insider’s Chief Tech Correspondent, where he leads coverage of Amazon. His reporting spans the company’s retail operations, AWS, Alexa, and its secretive internal work culture.Previously, he worked at CNBC, Fortune Magazine Korea, and Japan's Yomiuri Shimbun. He holds degrees from NYU and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.In 2022, Eugene broke a story uncovering Amazon’s practice of deceptively enrolling customers in Prime and deliberately making cancellation difficult. A year later, the Federal Trade Commission sued the company, citing his reporting. That case culminated in a record $2.5 billion settlement in 2025.His reporting has earned multiple honors, including the SF Press Club’s Bay Area Journalism Award and SPJ NorCal’s Excellence in Journalism Award.Eugene lives in the Bay Area. Contact him via email at [email protected], or Signal, Telegram, or WhatsApp at 650-942-3061. Use a personal email address, a nonwork WiFi network, and a nonwork device; here's our guide to sharing information securely. ExpertiseAmazon, Jeff Bezos, Andy Jassy, e-commerce, and cloud computing.Popular ArticlesAmazon:Internal Amazon emails give an exclusive look at how CEO Andy Jassy has started to run the company, with obsessive attention to the retail business and what some employees feel is micromanagingAndy Jassy will be the next CEO of Amazon. Insiders dish on what it's like to work for Jeff Bezos' successor, who built AWS into a $40 billion business.Internal documents show Amazon has for years knowingly tricked people into signing up for Prime subscriptions. 'We have been deliberately confusing,' former employee says.Inside Amazon's flailing brick-and-mortar ambitions: missed projections, pressure to cut costs, and a war with Whole FoodsInside Amazon's complex employee-review system, where workers feel left in the dark and managers expect to give 5% of reports bad reviewsAfter 28 years, 'Day 2' finally arrives at AmazonAWS, Alexa, healthcare:Inside Amazon's struggle to break into the lucrative market for SaaS business applications, including an internal pitch to buy $38 billion HubSpotInside Amazon's struggle to crack Nvidia's AI-chip dominanceAmazon's AI data center dream runs into the reality of 'zombie' facilities, higher costs, and labor shortagesAmazon is gutting its voice assistant, Alexa. Employees describe a division in crisis and huge losses on 'a wasted opportunity.'Amazon is working on a new 'Remarkable Alexa,' but internal politics and technical issues plague the projectAmazon projected huge losses from its healthcare business in 2024, but strong sales growth, internal document reveals
Amazon Generative AI Artificial Intelligence More Big Tech Exclusive
The most interesting thing about Amazon (AMZN -0.33%) and its upcoming second-quarter earnings report isn’t the growth of its web-based retail store. It’s not even the continued growth of Amazon Web Services, the biggest cloud computing company in the world.
Instead, investors will be looking at Amazon’s spending, particularly on servers, storage, and other infrastructure to build out its AI footprint. Amazon previously announced it would spend a mind-boggling $200 billion on capital expenditures this year, and all signs point to that number rising when it reports earnings after the close on July 30.
Here’s why.
Image source: Amazon.
Wall Street is focused on AI spendingWe are deep in earnings season, and one of the major themes so far has been spending by big tech stocks -- and the market’s negative reaction to that. Alphabet’s (GOOG +2.33%) (GOOGL +2.13%) second-quarter report on July 22 showed that it grew revenue by 24% to $119.79 billion, and its Google Cloud revenue jumped by 82% to $24.76 billion. But investors fixated on Alphabet’s announcement that it would increase its capex from $185 billion to $200 billion, which would match Amazon’s own plans. Alphabet stock fell 6% on the news.
Then there’s Tesla (TSLA -1.43%), another member of the Magnificent Seven grouping. Tesla doesn’t have a cloud computing business. Still, it is investing heavily in AI to develop and train AI models for its Optimus robots and full self-driving technology. Tesla also reported a big revenue spike in its Q2 earnings, up 26% year over year to $28.23 billion. But the company’s operating margins shrank to just 1.4%, adjusted earnings of $0.33 were far below expectations, and the company reported negative free cash flow of $1.1 billion in the quarter.
Tesla’s chief financial officer, Vaibhav Taneja, told analysts that the free cash flow shortfall was because the company’s capex more than doubled sequentially in the quarter, and would continue to grow in the second half of the year and through 2028. The company projected capex of $25 billion this year and announced plans to borrow up to $30 billion.
You can guess what happened next. The market shrugged off the revenue jump and focused on the shrinking margins, negative cash flow, and borrowing plans. Tesla’s stock has fallen more than 20% since its earnings report last week.
What to expect from Amazon’s earnings reportAmazon has had an up-and-down year, and the stock is just above water so far. But it’s far from immune to the challenges facing big tech right now, and Amazon stock already dropped 5% in the last week following the Alphabet and Tesla reports.
The best thing about Amazon for the last several years has been Amazon Web Services (AWS). Amazon has the largest share of the global cloud computing market at 28%, and it's been investing heavily as companies increasingly turn to cloud environments to train and run AI programs.
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AWS generated $37.58 billion in sales in the first quarter, up 28% from a year ago. Operating income from AWS was $14.16 billion -- 59% of the entire company’s operating income.
Investors will want to see how Amazon improved, but the biggest questions will come from Amazon’s guidance, and whether the company raises its capex budget -- and by how much. CEO Andy Jassy has said Amazon will be a “meaningful leader” in AI. “We’re not investing approximately $200 billion in capex in 2026 on a hunch,” he said in April.
Tesla and Alphabet’s reports are important clues that AI spending is accelerating, not decreasing. There’s more evidence in the strong earnings reports of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, the world’s largest chip foundry, and ASML, which makes machines to create chips. Both companies recently raised their full-year guidance due to strong demand for AI infrastructure.
You also have the evidence from memory and storage companies, such as Western Digital, Sandisk, and Micron Technology, that are seeing huge increases in storage and memory products from data centers.
When you put all these data points together, you can make a reasonable hypothesis that Amazon will likely increase its capex again. Add that to another data point -- Amazon will likely see negative free cash flow (FCF) this quarter, as its trailing 12-month FCF fell to $1.2 billion in Q1, down 95% from a year ago.
Any combination of Amazon raising capex, showing negative free cash flow, or taking on new debt -- could pressure the stock. If all three happen, as they did with Tesla -- then Amazon shareholders could have a very rough day.
Amazon Leo is displayed during the Delivering the Future EMEA 2026 event at Amazon's LCY3 fulfilment centre in Dartford, Britain, June 4, 2026. REUTERS/Toby Shepheard/File Photo Purchase Licensing Rights, opens new tab
July 27 (Reuters) - Amazon's (AMZN.O), opens new tab Leo has proposed a new constellation of up to 5,105 satellites to provide direct-to-device voice and data connectivity, joining a growing race among satellite operators to beam cellular service directly to smartphones.
The proposed direct-to-device network would provide voice, messaging, data and emergency services in areas beyond the reach of terrestrial cellular networks, with deployment beginning in 2028.
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The service will partner with mobile network operators globally and use Globalstar's mobile satellite spectrum following Amazon's agreement to acquire Globalstar (GSAT.O), opens new tab earlier this year.
The move expands Amazon's satellite ambitions beyond broadband internet and intensifies competition in the direct-to-device market, with SpaceX (SPCX.O), opens new tab, AST SpaceMobile (ASTS.O), opens new tab and Lynk Global also developing satellite-to-phone services.
A growing shortage of rocket launch capacity has, however, become one of the biggest constraints to deploying a wave of next generation of satellite constellations.
Reporting by Akash Sriram in Bengaluru; Editing by Shinjini Ganguli
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Amazon (AMZN -0.70%), the world's largest e-commerce and cloud infrastructure company, will post its second-quarter earnings report on July 30. Analysts expect its revenue and EPS to rise 17% and 8%, respectively, year over year. Should you buy Amazon's stock, which has stayed nearly flat year to date, before it releases that closely watched report?
Image source: Getty Images.
What are the catalysts and challenges for Amazon's stock? Amazon generates most of its revenue from its e-commerce business, but most of its profits come from Amazon Web Services (AWS), the world's largest cloud infrastructure platform. AWS controlled nearly a third of the cloud platform market last year, according to Canalys.
Its e-commerce business faces inflationary and competitive headwinds. Still, it's addressing those challenges by regionalizing its fulfillment network, automating its warehouses, adjusting its third-party seller fees, selling more everyday essentials, and launching low-cost storefronts.
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AWS is growing rapidly as more companies expand their cloud infrastructure to handle the latest AI applications. It hosts Bedrock, a platform that helps companies access multiple AI models, develops agentic AI tools, and produces custom AI chips. But to support that expansion, Amazon will boost its capex from $131.8 billion in 2025 to $200 billion in 2026, even as it prunes its workforce. That near-term pressure on margins makes its top-line growth less impressive.
However, Amazon is also expanding its higher-margin advertising business -- which sells integrated ads and promoted listings across its marketplace -- to offset that pressure. That business could eventually become a secondary profit engine alongside AWS.
Is Amazon's stock worth buying today? Amazon's stock has stayed flat this year because investors are concerned about the macro headwinds for its e-commerce business and its increased cloud and AI spending. But at the same time, its e-commerce and cloud businesses remain well-positioned to grow over the long term. That tug-of-war between the bulls and bears could continue through the rest of the year.
For 2026, analysts expect Amazon's revenue and EPS to grow 15% and 22%, respectively. Its stock still looks reasonably valued at 27 times forward earnings. So if you still believe in its long-term growth potential, it's safe to buy the stock as most investors fret over its near-term challenges. That said, any upward revisions to its full-year capex or warnings about the macro environment in its upcoming earnings report might cause its stock to drop, so it might be prudent to wait for the market's broader reaction before buying more shares.
Amazon zavírá své sanfranciské pracoviště AGI v rámci letošních propouštění, ale výzkum frontier modelů pokračuje. Novinka Nova Act zůstává dostupná na AWS.
by Todd Bishop on Jul 24, 2026 at 12:46 pmJuly 24, 2026 at 12:49 pm
GeekWire File Photo Amazon is closing its San Francisco AGI site as part of the layoffs it made this week in its artificial general intelligence organization, but said its frontier model research lab will continue.
A company spokesperson confirmed the news of the site closure, which was first reported by The Information. Amazon’s frontier model research work will carry on under Pieter Abbeel, a UC Berkeley professor who joined Amazon in 2024 when the company licensed the technology and hired the team from Covariant, the robotics startup he co-founded.
The AGI Lab was founded in December 2024 and initially built around several dozen employees Amazon brought in from the startup Adept, including its co-founder and CEO David Luan.
The team grew to about 80 people at its peak, according to The Information, but more than a dozen of the Adept hires have since left, Luan among them. Earlier this week, Amazon confirmed it was cutting an unspecified number of jobs across the broader AGI organization.
Impacted employees will have the chance to explore other roles at Amazon, the spokesperson said, and the company is supporting them through that process.
Nova Act, the browser-agent model and service that came out of the group, remains available on AWS and in use by customers. More broadly, AWS has continued to build out its agentic AI lineup, including Bedrock AgentCore and applications like Kiro, Quick, Continuum and Transform.
The moves come as Amazon invests heavily in helping customers deploy AI, including a $1 billion AWS effort to embed engineers with businesses building AI agents. The initiative reflects an expanded industry focus toward putting agents and models to better use for customers.
Previous Story‘The Odyssey’ isn’t on IMAX 70mm in Seattle — is it worth a journey for the summer’s biggest film?
Moody’s varuje, že bezprecedentní výdaje na AI zhoršují úvěrovou kvalitu Amazonu, Meta, Alphabetu a dalších hyperscalerů. Kapitálové výdaje mají v roce 2026 dosáhnout 785 miliard USD a v příštím roce zhruba 1 bilionu USD.
The race to build artificial intelligence infrastructure at a trillion-dollar annual clip is eroding the free cash flow and increasing balance-sheet risk at so-called hyperscalers, warned Moody's Ratings.
In a research note released this week, Moody's said that the spending surge is forcing even the world's most cash-rich corporations like Alphabet and Microsoft to lean heavily on debt, stock sales and off-balance-sheet moves to fund their AI ambitions.
"Previously, these companies relied on asset-light structures centered on software, intellectual property, and scalable cloud services that required modest capital investment," Moody's said in the Wednesday note. "The transition from asset-light to asset-heavy models requires unprecedented levels of investment and capital raising."
The moves "threaten credit quality" for the six companies tracked by Moody's, which include Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Oracle and CoreWeave, according to the report.
The ratings firm projects that capital expenditures — or capex, which are investment for physical assets like data centers — will hit $785 billion in 2026 before reaching about $1 trillion next year.
The shift breaks a decades-long Silicon Valley formula that created the world's most valuable companies. Software costs little to replicate, yielding fat profit margins and fortress balance sheets. Generative AI, by contrast, demands a vast physical footprint: warehouses crammed with expensive and energy-hungry servers and chips.
To finance the expansion, tech giants are increasingly turning to Wall Street, resulting in booming profits for the financial industry.
Direct debt across the six hyperscalers has reached approximately $460 billion, according to Moody's. Tech companies are also tapping public markets for cash, including Google-parent Alphabet, which last month announced an $85 billion equity sale.
Leasing data centersThe ratings firm noted that because AI hardware and infrastructure require massive upfront investment while revenue materializes over a longer time horizon, free cash flow across the sector is coming under pressure.
To keep direct debt off their balance sheets, hyperscalers are leaning on off-balance-sheet financing, mostly through long-term data center leases, the report explained.
Moody's said that lease commitments across the group have ballooned to $1.2 trillion. More than $820 billion of that total is from leases that haven't started yet, meaning the data centers are still being built.
While these obligations don't show up as traditional debt, Moody's says it considers them as debt-equivalent liabilities that will bind companies to significant rent payments down the line.
Despite the warning, Moody's noted that Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon and Meta retain among the strongest corporate balance sheets in the world, making it unlikely that their investment grade ratings are under imminent threat.
The immediate pressure is concentrated on lower-rated entities like Oracle and specialized AI cloud provider CoreWeave. Oracle carries a rating of Baa2 with a negative outlook, placing it just two notches above junk status.
Meanwhile, CoreWeave operates within the high-yield market with a Ba3 rating, relying on complex private debt structures to finance its GPU hardware fleets.
Circular ecosystem Moody's also pointed to structural circularity within the AI boom. Some of the multibillion-dollar backlogs reported by hyperscalers stem from strategic deals with pre-IPO artificial intelligence labs including OpenAI and Anthropic, Moody's noted.
The firms have invested billions into AI labs that, in turn, spend heavily on cloud computing from those same companies, creating what Moody's described as a circular AI ecosystem.
The overlapping relationships heighten risks because many of the industry's biggest companies are increasingly dependent on the same AI customers and the same assumptions about future demand, Moody's said.
Even so, the tech giants have significant strengths that help offset those risks.
Demand for AI computing remains robust, cloud businesses continue to grow and hyperscalers have signed hundreds of billions of dollars in long-term customer contracts that should provide predictable revenue. Those deals support the industry's largely-strong credit profiles, even amid the spending boom.
Still, investors should recognize that the tech industry's financial profile is undergoing a structural change unlike anything seen in the cloud era, according to Moody's.
"Investors will increasingly focus on these companies' ability to realize an adequate return on investment," the ratings firm said.
Amazon má 143 miliard USD v penězích a peněžních ekvivalentech a 364 miliard USD v dlouhodobých cloudových smlouvách, což podle článku tlumí obavy z vyšších kapitálových výdajů. Investice do infrastruktury sice krátkodobě tlačí na volný peněžní tok, ale mají přinést velmi ziskové výnosy do konce roku 2028.
SummaryWhile critics panic over increasing CapEx, Amazon’s $143 billion cash reserves generate enough in quarterly interest income to fund debt obligations.Amazon has $364 billion, and counting, in legally binding, long-term cloud contracts that ensure data center compute capacity is accounted for before construction completes.Though infrastructure investments have temporarily reduced short-term free cash flow, these assets are projected to deliver highly profitable returns by the end of 2028 and for many years to follow.Editor's note: Seeking Alpha is proud to welcome MarginMinded as a new contributing analyst. You can become one too! Share your best investment idea by submitting your article for review to our editors. Get published, earn money, and unlock exclusive SA Premium access.
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Amazon bude od třetích stran vyžadovat označování obrázků a videí s „osobami vytvořenými pomocí AI“ v reakci na nový zákon v New Yorku. Na svém webu také přidá indikátor u položek, kde se takový obsah objeví.
Amazon is requiring that third-party sellers label any product images or videos that contain "AI-generated people" after New York recently passed a law mandating greater transparency around "synthetic performers" in ads.
The company informed sellers Wednesday of the policy change, according to a copy of the announcement viewed by CNBC. The policy directs sellers to tag images and any "A+ content," which refers to videos or other graphics on listing pages, with specific metadata keywords before they're uploaded.
"Recent legislation requires disclosure when images or videos in advertisements contain photorealistic AI-generated people," Amazon wrote in the announcement.
The New York law, which took effect last month, requires companies to disclose if "synthetic performers" are used in place of human actors in advertising. The legislation applies to "digitally-created media that appear as a real person." Governor Kathy Hochul described it as a "first-in-the-nation" law.
"Without notice that the content the public is viewing is not real, AI-generated synthetic performers and manipulated media can undermine one's ability to accurately distill fact from fiction," Hochul's office said in a release.
Amazon clarified in its announcement that the requirement doesn't apply to content featuring TV, video game and movie characters, or content that includes real people, even if they've been altered using AI.
The company said it will "add an indicator" to listings on its website, informing consumers that images or other content feature AI-generated people, "where applicable." It's unclear what criteria Amazon will apply when deciding when to display the label to shoppers.
Amazon didn't immediately provide a comment.
Amazon has embraced AI internally and it's increasingly infusing the technology across its portfolio. The company has optimized listing titles and details so they're more likely to be spotted by AI systems, invested in a recently rebranded assistant called Alexa for Shopping, and launched a feature that injects AI-generated products into its search bar in real time based on user queries.
More Amazon third-party sellers are using AI to generate text, images and other content for their listings, partly by using the company's tools.
Outside sellers are the engine behind Amazon's core retail business, accounting for more than 60% of goods sold on its marketplace.
There is no federal law requiring companies to disclose when advertising content has been created using AI.
States have taken steps to require greater transparency around AI content. Earlier this year, California began requiring large AI providers to embed watermarks in AI-generated images, video or other content.
Meta, TikTok, Pinterest and Google's YouTube have added AI-generated content labels to videos and images uploaded to their platforms. TikTok and Meta have recently been criticized for not adequately labeling ads that feature AI-generated influencers hawking dubious products, in some cases without a brand's knowledge.
TikTok has said it's taken steps to ban accounts that make misleading health claims, and Meta said it labels AI videos
Alphabet zvýšil výhled kapitálových výdajů na 195 až 205 miliard USD, protože poptávka po kapacitě převyšuje nabídku. Akcie společnosti následující den klesly o 6 %.
Big tech companies and spending on artificial intelligence and its infrastructure have been one of the biggest stories in the stock market this year, ever since Amazon (AMZN -4.53%), Alphabet (GOOG -6.68%) (GOOGL -6.80%), Microsoft, and Meta Platforms disclosed plans to spend $700 billion on capital expenditures this year.
Of that, Amazon was the biggest spender at $200 billion, with Alphabet close behind at $185 billion. But in the company’s second-quarter earnings call with analysts, Alphabet executives announced plans to join Amazon in the $200 billion club, spending its capex primarily on servers, connectivity, storage, and memory for data centers.
Alphabet stock fell 6% the next day. Will Amazon also raise its capex spending when it reports earnings on July 30? And just as importantly, will Amazon stock face the same fate as Alphabet?
Image source: Amazon.
Why is Alphabet raising capex?Alphabet, the parent company of Google, spent $44.9 billion on capex in the second quarter, with 60% of that on servers and 40% on data centers and networking equipment. It had previously projected full-year capex to be in a range of $180 billion to $190 billion; it now anticipates spending between $195 billion and $205 billion.
“We're still in a supply constraint environment. I think we've said this now for multiple quarters in a row, we are seeing very strong demand, both from external cloud customers as well as across the business. Our goal is to invest as long as we see an attractive return on that investment,” CFO Anat Ashkenazi said.
In short, Alphabet says that demand is outpacing computing capacity, even though Alphabet is accelerating its spending.
Overall earnings for Alphabet were exceptionally strong, with revenue of $119.79 billion, up 24% from a year ago. Google Cloud revenues were $24.76 billion, up 82% from a year ago.
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How likely is it for Amazon to also raise capex?I believe it’s very likely. First, consider that Amazon is a much larger cloud provider than Alphabet. Amazon Web Services has the greatest global share of the cloud computing market at 28%, followed by Microsoft at 21% and Google Cloud at 14%.
Second, Amazon has been very public and bullish about its capex. In a letter to shareholders in April, CEO Andy Jassy posted a lengthy statement on Amazon’s website justifying the company’s planned spending and saying it would be a “meaningful leader” in AI.
We’re not investing approximately $200 billion in capex in 2026 on a hunch. The recent OpenAI commitment (over $100 billion) is an example of this, but there are several other customer agreements completed (and unannounced), or deep in process. Of the AWS capex we expect to spend in 2026, much of which will be monetized in 2027-2028, we already have customer commitments for a substantial portion of it. And third, there are indications that major hyperscalers are accelerating their AI spending. BNP Paribas analyst Stefan Slowinski recently predicted in an investor report that Microsoft, the No. 2 cloud computing company by market share, would spend a whopping $262 billion on capex in its 2027 fiscal year. (Microsoft reports its fiscal fourth quarter and full year 2026 earnings on July 29, but the company had previously disclosed $104.3 billion in capex spending through its first three quarters.)
What to expect from Amazon’s earningsFirst, I would be shocked if Amazon did not increase its projected capex, but I also expect the market to react poorly because of it. Investors are very focused on the pressure big tech’s capex spending is putting on free cash flow, and I understand why there are concerns that Alphabet, Amazon, and the rest won’t be able to realize a profit from all this spending.
But as Jassy points out, Amazon isn’t spending blindly. As long as Amazon’s spending and planned investment are backed by customer commitments and the demand for more computing power exists, then Amazon looks to be a long-term winner. Any dip in the stock following earnings could be an appealing opportunity to acquire more shares.
Amazon přidává cloudové hraní Luna přímo do aplikace Prime Video prostřednictvím nové záložky Games, aby zvýšil povědomí mezi předplatiteli Prime. V USA a Británii mohou uživatelé s Prime a Fire TV spustit Luna bez příplatku.
by Thomas Wilde on Jul 23, 2026 at 8:46 amJuly 23, 2026 at 8:46 am
Amazon will begin to fold its Luna cloud platform directly into the Prime Video app via the new Games tab, in an effort to get word about Luna to Prime members. (Amazon Luna promotional image) Amazon announced today that it has updated some versions of its Prime Video app to include direct access to its cloud-based Luna gaming platform.
The business goal is to solve Luna’s awareness problem and bring new users to the platform. Many Prime members don’t know the gaming service is included with their membership.
Consumers in the US and UK who have both a Prime subscription and a Fire TV can now launch Luna directly from the Prime Video app, where it can be found in its own dedicated tab in the UI. Prime subscribers who launch Luna in the app will get direct access to a library of both casual and mainstream “AAA” video games for no additional cost and without having to exit the app.
“Effectively, we relaunched last October, taking a bunch of the value of Luna that had been behind a paywall… We pushed it into the Prime membership, as a way of providing great value and trying to grow our business,” Jeff Gattis, GM of gaming at Amazon, told GeekWire.
Players on Luna can stream an assortment of games to their TV or browser via Amazon’s cloud servers, using a smartphone as a controller if they don’t have a compatible gamepad. Luna’s current library ranges from established mainstream hits like Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Dispatch, and Fallout 4 to an assortment of casual-friendly exclusive titles like Amazon’s own Courtroom Chaos.
(Amazon Luna press image) Since that relaunch, Gattis said, the company has “basically 5x’d” its player base.
“The question for us is, how do you build upon that?” he said. “How do we let 200 million-plus Prime members worldwide know that they have this great benefit where you can play $70 games inside your Prime membership at no additional cost? One of our biggest challenges today remains that people don’t know the [Luna] benefit exists.”
While Luna was previously available to Prime subscribers via web browser and a couple of other types of smart TVs, it was a standalone service that required users to seek it out on its own. By shifting it into its own tab on the Prime Video app, Amazon’s hope is to drive up awareness that, well, Luna is there at all.
“It’ll start on Fire TV, but obviously our end state is to roll out to more countries and more devices, both first-party and third-party,” Gattis said. “Eventually we’ll be everywhere that Prime Video is.”
Dispatch, a viral indie hit from 2025 about office romance at a superhero agency, has been a big hit on Amazon Luna. (AdHoc Studio image) The integration of Luna with Prime could also potentially bring back the largely-abandoned practice of video game movie tie-ins. Fans of this summer’s Masters of the Universe reboot can watch the film on Prime Video, then switch to Luna to play Masters of the Universe: Legends Unite, a strategic deckbuilding game that’s currently exclusive to Luna. This kind of transmedia synergy used to be a part of every big summer action movie, but it’s largely fallen by the wayside since the 2010s.
Luna originally debuted in 2020 as a subscription-based cloud service. Subscribers could pay a monthly fee for access to over 100 video games, which they could play through their browser by streaming them from Amazon’s servers.
Back then, Luna was Amazon’s entry into what was shaping up to be a publisher-driven “battle for the cloud,” with companies like Google and Nvidia all launching their own game streaming services. Over time, however, the cloud’s impact on gaming hasn’t matched its early hype.
More recently, the component crunch has driven up the price of consoles and graphics cards, and that plays into Amazon’s bet on Luna.
Gattis said the cloud has been “technology ahead of its time,” in part because the industry aimed it at the wrong people, pitching it as a direct replacement for consoles and gaming PCs.
“That’s a heavy lift to ask somebody like myself,” he said. “I’ve invested both emotionally and financially in my Series X console and my 5090 graphics card. I’m happy.”
Amazon is catering to everyone else: players unlikely to buy a gaming PC or a current-generation console, let alone the next generation of gaming hardware at even higher prices. For the first time, Gattis said, there are “a lot more people who are going to think about the cloud as a viable alternative to $1,500 hardware.”
Amazon klesl o 4 % poté, co trh znervóznily obavy kolem výdajů na AI a vyšetřování Senátu kvůli vlivu Číny na marketplace. Investoři vyhlížejí výsledky příští týden.
Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN | AMZN Price Prediction) stock is down 4% to $234.81 Thursday afternoon, cutting through what had been a relatively steady July trading range for the e-commerce and cloud giant. The move lands inside a broader tech pullback, with the NASDAQ 100 down nearly 2% on the day. Amazon shares now sit well below their 50-day moving average of $251.16.
The drop comes a week ahead of the company’s Q2 2026 earnings release on July 30, sharpening focus on AI infrastructure spending, AWS growth, and any hint of regulatory drag. Today’s slide reflects a confluence of catalysts.
AI Capex Jitters and a Senate Overhang The dominant driver is a sector-wide rotation out of mega-cap AI names after Alphabet‘s (NASDAQ:GOOGL) capex guidance hike this week. Alphabet stock is down 6%, and Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META) shares are down 4%, as investors question whether AI returns will outpace ballooning infrastructure costs.
Layered on top are two Amazon-specific overhangs. Per a Bloomberg report roughly 17 hours old, the U.S. Senate Small Business Committee is investigating allegations Amazon allowed Chinese influence on its online marketplace. Republican committee staff said they found “compelling evidence” of Amazon “negligence related to Chinese influence,” though the cited committee email “didn’t cite any specific evidence.”
The probe stems from an earlier Bloomberg story about an alleged bribery market involving Amazon employees in China selling favors to merchants. Amazon declined to comment, and these remain allegations under investigation, not established facts. Separately, CNBC reported layoffs in Amazon’s artificial general intelligence (AGI) unit, framed by the company as a strategic realignment toward higher-impact projects.
Peers and Valuation Context The e-commerce peer group is trading softer but not dramatically so. eBay (NASDAQ:EBAY) stock is down 3%, and Etsy shares are down 2%, suggesting today’s Amazon move is more tech-and-regulatory driven than a broad consumer discretionary problem.
The valuation picture keeps Amazon roughly in line with its e-commerce peers. Amazon stock trades at a trailing-twelve-month P/E ratio of 28x, sitting between eBay stock at 25x and Etsy stock at 30x. For diversified exposure to Amazon, some traders use the State Street Consumer Discretionary Select Sector SPDR Fund (NYSE ARCA:XLY), though the fund is top-heavy. Amazon and Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) sit as outsized weights, so the ETF doesn’t provide extremely broad diversification.
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Bull Case Still Intact Into Earnings Despite the pullback, Wall Street remains constructive on Amazon stock into next Thursday’s earnings release. Bank of America reiterated a Buy rating on AMZN stock with a $310 price target, citing AI-driven AWS acceleration and expected Q2 revenue of $198.8 billion. The consensus analyst target sits near $313, with a Moderate Buy rating overall.
Amazon’s Q1 2026 setup supports that view. AWS grew 28% to $37.6 billion, the fastest pace in 15 quarters, and advertising crossed $70 billion in trailing revenue. Prediction markets currently price a 95% probability Amazon beats Q2 estimates.
Still, the bearish overlay shouldn’t be overlooked. Amazon’s Q1 2026 capital expenditures hit $44.2 billion, and the company’s TTM free cash flow fell to $1.2 billion, a reminder of how much cash the AI buildout is consuming. Regulatory noise from the Senate probe adds another wild card.
What to Watch Investors can watch for whether Amazon stock holds the 200-day moving average of $234.35 into the close, and whether AWS growth, operating income guidance, and any capex commentary on the July 30 call reset the narrative. Maintaining modest position sizing into the earnings release may be the reasonable path here, given the regulatory tail risk sitting alongside a fundamentally strong quarter.
The key tension is straightforward: a strong fundamental setup (accelerating AWS, expanding advertising, and a Q1 beat) is running headlong into an AI-capex debate that just claimed Alphabet and Meta Platforms as collateral damage. Whether Amazon’s Q2 print reframes the spending narrative or reinforces it will likely dictate direction into August.
The takeaway for investors: today’s AMZN stock pullback looks more like sentiment and headline risk than a fundamental break. Traders comfortable with volatility may find the setup attractive, while longer-term holders should focus on AWS growth, operating margin trajectory, and management’s tone on the roughly $200 billion 2026 capex plan when Amazon reports next week.
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Amazon.com stock is trending lower. What’s pulling AMZN shares down? Earnings Preview & HistoryAmazon is scheduled to report second-quarter earnings on July 30. Analysts estimate EPS of $1.82 along with revenue of $196.02 billion. For the prior quarter, Amazon reported EPS of $2.78, beating the consensus estimate of $1.64. The company also posted revenue of $181.52 billion, exceeding the consensus estimate of $177.29 billion.
Over the last four quarters, Amazon has averaged an EPS surprise of 0.30% and a revenue surprise of 0.02%.
What To WatchInvestors will be watching AWS revenue growth and operating margin closely, since that’s the clearest signal of whether enterprise AI demand is actually boosting cloud profitability rather than just driving up capex and depreciation. Advertising revenue growth is another key figure to track, as it can help offset retail margin pressure and keep overall operating income moving in the right direction.
In North America and International retail, the focus shifts to operating income and fulfillment cost trends — if shipping and logistics costs start climbing again, they could quickly eat into any gains from stronger sales.
Analyst Consensus & Recent Actions The stock carries a Buy rating with an average price forecast of $320.10. Recent analyst moves include:
Wells Fargo: Overweight (Raises Target to $322.00) (July 21) Keybanc: Overweight (Raises Target to $335.00) (July 16) Wedbush: Outperform (Target $293.00) (July 16) A Tug-of-War Above the 200-Day AverageFrom a trend perspective, Amazon is in a "tug-of-war" zone: it’s trading 2.1% below the 20-day SMA ($243.61) and 4.8% below the 50-day SMA ($250.60), but it’s still 1.7% above the 200-day SMA ($234.46). That mix often reads as a pullback inside a longer uptrend, with the 200-day acting as the line bulls want to defend.
Momentum is also fairly balanced, with RSI at 47.59 (neutral), suggesting the stock isn’t stretched enough to force either capitulation selling or a snapback rally on momentum alone. In practice, that puts more weight on nearby levels and moving averages—especially whether price can reclaim the 20-day/50-day area on rebounds.
The moving-average structure is mixed: the 20-day SMA is below the 50-day SMA (a bearish near-term crossover), while the 50-day SMA remains above the 200-day SMA after the golden cross in May. Traders will often treat that as "long-term trend intact, short-term trend under pressure," which fits with the recent swing high in May followed by a swing low in June.
Key levels are fairly clean here, with overhead supply near the mid-$240s to around $250 and a more meaningful downside reference well below current price. A break and hold back above the 50-day area would improve the near-term picture, while losing the 200-day would raise the odds that the pullback is turning into something deeper.
Key Resistance: $249.50 — lines up closely with the 50-day SMA area ($250.60), a common spot where rebounds can stall Key Support: $225.00 — a nearby downside level traders may watch as a prior demand zone if the pullback accelerates Benzinga Edge RankingsBelow is the Benzinga Edge scorecard for Amazon, highlighting its strengths and weaknesses compared to the broader market:
The Verdict: Amazon’s Benzinga Edge signal reveals a growth-heavy profile with only moderate momentum, which fits a stock that can trend long-term but still chop around key moving averages in the short run. For traders, that often means waiting for either a reclaim of the $249.50 area or a cleaner dip toward support before pressing directional bets.
Amazon Shares Edge LowerAMZN Price Action: At the time of publication, Amazon shares are trading 3.11% lower at $237.24, according to data from Benzinga Pro.
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This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors.
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Jeff Bezos tlačí na redesign Prime Video, aby AI stála v centru služby. Projekt Lighthouse má zlepšit doporučování i hlasové ovládání pro více než 200 milionů uživatelů.
SummaryCompaniesPrime Video to receive an AI-driven redesignJeff Bezos is overseeing Prime Video projectAmazon aims to improve its battered reputation in AISAN FRANCISCO, July 23 (Reuters) - Jeff Bezos has identified a new, high-profile platform to help showcase the hundreds of billions of dollars Amazon (AMZN.O), opens new tab has bet on artificial intelligence: Prime Video.
The Amazon founder and executive chairman pushed Prime Video head Mike Hopkins to overhaul the streaming service so that AI is front and center, according to four people with direct knowledge of the matter.
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The resulting project, known internally as Lighthouse, would shine a light on Amazon’s AI capabilities for the more than 200 million consumers who use Prime Video.
Lighthouse is viewed as one critical piece in Amazon’s companywide efforts to elevate the company’s stature in artificial intelligence, as competitors like OpenAI and Anthropic speed ahead, the people said. Other AI initiatives, such as the multiyear overhaul of its Alexa voice assistant to provide more conversational responses, have had mixed results and the unit is still losing money, people familiar with the matter have previously told Reuters.
Amazon declined to comment.
CONTENTIOUS MEETING SPARKED OVERHAULThe Prime Video initiative grew out of an internal presentation the streaming service’s executives made to Bezos last autumn that turned contentious, according to these people.
Bezos was displeased that Hopkins' plans to update Prime Video failed to sufficiently highlight the service’s capabilities in AI and personalization, according to the people. Bezos' response prompted the Prime Video executives to scrap their previous plans and embark on Lighthouse.
The company has committed some $200 billion to capital expenditures this year, related primarily to developing AI, and invested an initial $23 billion in ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and Anthropic combined, with the potential for upwards of another $40 billion.
Lighthouse entails a broad swath of new features that use AI to improve film and TV recommendations, in part by learning consumers' preferences, and responding to spoken requests, according to one person with knowledge of the project who spoke on condition of anonymity. Prime Video is working on redesigning the main home page as part of the project, the other people said.
The final redesign has not yet been settled, but one option Prime Video executives discussed includes AI-driven tiles, with pre-populated viewing suggestions like “action movies from the 1980s” or “Christmas rom-coms,” three of the people said. Another source said a current version does not include text-heavy tiles.
The traditional search function would remain, as well as space at the top of the screen for video highlights promoting new releases or sporting events, such as “Thursday Night Football,” the weekly National Football League game that is exclusive to Amazon.
Amazon is already testing versions of the redesign with a few users, said one of the people. Prime Video's plans, the people said, could change due to feedback from early testers, or financial or other concerns.
Prime Video, like other streaming services, relies on paid placement by studios, as well as software algorithms, to dictate where content is displayed on the home screen, said Michael Goodman, director of entertainment research for Parks Associates. Any change to that, including through greater personalization, could upend that system, he said.
“The real estate on the home screen is very valuable to studios, so it would be a big change to take away any of that coveted space,” said Goodman.
FOUNDER'S PERSONAL INVOLVEMENTBezos has been personally involved in the Prime Video overhaul, the people said, including receiving occasional updates, underscoring the stakes for a company battling a reputation for subpar AI foundation models. Improved personalization can lead to more hours spent on the service.
His involvement with the Prime Video project is unusual as he has taken a step back from most day-to-day operations at Amazon since relinquishing the CEO title in 2021. He also owns the Washington Post and is the founder of spaceflight firm Blue Origin and AI startup Prometheus, reportedly valued at around $41 billion. He has focused more of his attention on those projects.
Prime Video is one of Amazon's best-known brands and is available to consumers in a number of markets where Amazon has limited or no e-commerce presence. Beyond no-cost shipping, Prime Video is the Prime subscription's most-used offering.
As part of the Lighthouse project, Amazon has also discussed integrating the Alexa voice assistant into Prime Video’s search function, the people said. Amazon in early 2025 released an overhauled generative AI version of Alexa, and integrated it into its main shopping site in May 2026.
Kam Keshmiri, global head of the Prime Video design, was also at the meeting with Bezos and is now leading the Lighthouse redesign, the people said.
PRIME VIDEO'S MARKET POSITIONIn the U.S., Prime Video is the fourth most-watched streaming service, but it is prized by Bezos, who frequents high-profile Hollywood events and owns a $165 million home in Beverly Hills.
Amazon became the first streaming service to win an Academy Award in a major category. The company deepened its commitment to entertainment in 2022 when it paid $8.5 billion to buy MGM, giving it access to many well-known entertainment franchises, including James Bond.
Prime Video’s 4.2% share of television viewing in the U.S. trails YouTube with 13.4%, Netflix (NFLX.O), opens new tab at 7.8% and Walt Disney's (DIS.N), opens new tab Disney+ at 5%, according to April data from Nielsen. Still, many Prime Video members spend hours a week consuming content on the platform, and the company wants to further hone its personalization capabilities through AI.
The service released a significant redesign in July 2024, aimed at making it easier for users to distinguish between what content is free and what costs extra, such as subscriptions to Paramount+ and TV shows and movies that require a rental fee.
Amazon wants Prime Video to be users’ central hub for paid subscriptions.
Reporting by Greg Bensinger in San Francisco and Dawn Chmielewski in Los Angeles; Editing by Edmund Lee and Matthew Lewis
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab
Greg Bensinger joined Reuters as a technology correspondent in 2022 focusing on the world's largest technology companies. He was previously a member of The New York Times editorial board and a technology beat reporter for The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. He also worked for Bloomberg News writing about the auto and telecommunications industries. He studied English literature at The University of Virginia and graduate journalism at Columbia University. Greg lives in San Francisco with his wife and two children.
Počet zaměstnanců Amazonu pobírajících potravinovou a zdravotní pomoc se od roku 2020 téměř ztrojnásobil. Firma zároveň plánuje v roce 2026 investovat do AI infrastruktury 200 miliard USD.
A new Government Accountability Office report commissioned by Sen. Bernie Sanders finds the number of Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN | AMZN Price Prediction) workers relying on federal food and health assistance has nearly tripled since 2020, even as the company disclosed plans to spend $200 billion on artificial intelligence infrastructure in 2026.
The GAO reviewed enrollment data from 11 states representing roughly one-fifth of the U.S. population, covering February 2020 through September 2025. In those states, 12,346 Amazon workers were enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and 11,338 in Medicaid, figures the report says are nearly triple the counts in the prior GAO study.
Amazon ranked second among traditional employers of public-assistance recipients in the sample, behind Walmart, which had 16,055 workers on Medicaid, a 55% increase from the earlier report, and 15,515 on SNAP. Gig platforms including Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Grubhub and Instacart collectively surpassed Walmart to become the single largest category of SNAP recipients, a reflection of how contract labor has reshaped the low-wage workforce.
A National Picture Nationally, the GAO estimates 13.8 million working Americans are on Medicaid, up from 12 million in 2020, and 10.6 million on SNAP, up from 9 million. Wage data helps explain the persistence. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports average hourly earnings for the total private sector reached $37.64 in June 2026, but real average hourly earnings have barely moved, sitting at $11.32 in June 2026 compared with $11.18 in June 2024. The BEA’s latest quarterly figures show transfer receipts have grown to $5,099.7 billion in the first quarter of 2026, with Medicaid outlays climbing to $1,060.2 billion.
The Corporate Side of the Ledger Over roughly the same window covered by the GAO study, Amazon’s annual profit grew from $11.59 billion to $77.67 billion. Revenue reached $716.92 billion in fiscal 2025, with operating income of $79.98 billion.
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On the Q4 2025 earnings call on Feb. 5, 2026, CEO Andy Jassy told investors the company would spend about $200 billion in capital expenditures in 2026, a roughly 60% increase from about $125 billion in 2025, saying the outlays are “predominantly in AWS” to meet AI compute demand. Jassy characterized the spend as demand-driven: “We are monetizing capacity as fast as we can install it.”
The most recent quarter offers evidence the AI bet is landing. AWS generated $37.59 billion in revenue in Q1 2026, up 28% year over year, the segment’s fastest growth in 15 quarters. Capital expenditures in that single quarter hit $44.2 billion, and free cash flow fell sharply as the buildout accelerated. Prediction market participants on Polymarket assign a 0.89 probability that Amazon’s 2026 capex will exceed $200 billion.
What to Watch The two datasets cover overlapping but nonidentical fiscal years, which limits any causal reading between the AI outlays and the growth in workers on public assistance. The GAO report establishes that the workforce dependency trend accelerated during years when Amazon’s earnings, and its capital ambitions, were expanding at their fastest pace in company history. The next signal comes on July 30, 2026, when Amazon reports Q2 results and updates its capex guidance for the balance of the year.
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Amazon přepracoval Alexa+, aby méně spoléhala na modely Anthropic a více na vlastní AI, s cílem výrazně snížit náklady na provoz. Interní odhady počítaly s cloudovými náklady AWS kolem 1,7 miliardy USD v roce 2026.
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An Alexa+ signage during an unveiling event in New York, US, on Wednesday, Feb. 26, 2025. Bloomberg/Getty Images Amazon has redesigned Alexa to rely less on Anthropic models, part of a sweeping effort to lower the cost of running its AI-powered voice assistant, according to internal documents reviewed by Business Insider.
The documents, which span late last year through early this year, show Amazon pursuing a series of changes in how Alexa generates answers by routing more requests to its in-house AI models, avoiding unnecessary calls to Anthropic's Claude models, and squeezing more work from each GPU.
Together, the initiatives were expected to more than quadruple the number of customer transactions each unit of computing capacity could support.
The effort offers a glimpse into AI's next battleground.
As frontier models become more capable, competition is shifting from building smarter AI to making them cheaper to run. Google has promoted lower-cost AI through Gemini Flash, while companies including OpenAI and Cursor have introduced techniques that automatically send simpler requests to lower-cost models.
Amazon's financial projections underscore why the company has devoted so much effort to this challenge.
Internal forecasts from early this year showed AWS cloud costs for the upgraded, AI-powered Alexa+ were on pace to reach roughly $1.7 billion in 2026, nearly triple the previous year.
Alexa+ was also projected to run about 60% above Amazon's target for AWS cloud cost per monthly active user. Even after identifying roughly $450 million in potential savings, internal reviews concluded the business would not hit its financial targets. Amazon declined to comment.
A costly new AlexaUnlike earlier versions of Alexa, Alexa+ generates many responses with large language models running on GPU-intensive cloud services. That turned relatively inexpensive voice requests into AI workloads that cost far more to serve.
Those costs became more important as Amazon worked through a difficult launch. Business Insider previously reported that the company delayed Alexa+ multiple times as engineers grappled with AI hallucinations and questions about whether the service was ready for customers. Alexa+ expanded its availability in the US earlier this year.
Scaling the service only increased the financial pressure, a sign of how different generative AI is from more traditional software services.
As Alexa+ rolled out to more users, Amazon projected sharply higher AWS cloud spending as demand for AI computing capacity grew.
The company even weighed delaying some of its most expensive AI initiatives. Business Insider previously reported that Project Moonraker, Amazon's effort to give Alexa more advanced AI agent capabilities, was expected to become the service's largest AI expense this year, and the company considered delaying parts of the project as it searched for savings.
Reducing unnecessary calls to Claude
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy Andrej Sokolow/picture alliance via Getty Images One of Amazon's priorities was narrowing where Anthropic's Claude models would be used inside Alexa+.
Internal roadmaps called for moving specialized Alexa "Experts" from Claude Sonnet to Amazon's own AI models while reducing other use of Claude across the digital-assistant service.
Amazon also sought to avoid inference whenever possible. Inference is how AI models are run, and one way to limit the cost of this is to use caching, which stores answers to common requests so the AI doesn't have to do the same work again.
One Amazon roadmap called for Alexa+ to stop calling Claude models when suitable answers were already available in cache, and expand "deterministic" handling, which enables Alexa to answer more predictable requests without tapping a large language model.
The strategy is notable given Amazon's deep ties to Anthropic. Amazon has invested billions in the AI startup, partners closely with it, and stands to reap a significant windfall from Anthropic's IPO, if that goes ahead.
Yet the official internal documents reviewed by Business Insider show Amazon has been looking for ways to reduce how often Alexa relies on Anthropic's models.
Amazon's approach mirrors a growing trend across the AI industry. Investment firm William Blair wrote in a recent report that software companies are starting to reserve frontier models for difficult, high-stakes reasoning while routing less complex requests to cheaper models. That lowers inference costs without changing the customer experience.
"Multi-model routing is becoming standard architecture in software," analysts at William Blair wrote in the report.
Delivering more with fewer GPUsReducing model costs was only one part of the strategy. Amazon also focused on increasing how much work each GPU could perform.
Rather than simply adding more Nvidia GPUs, Amazon wanted to process more customer requests from the same computing gear. One roadmap projected software upgrades would increase available computing capacity by roughly 50% while cutting response times by about 40%. Internal planning dashboards tracked projected customer growth, GPU utilization, available capacity and inference efficiency as Amazon prepared to scale Alexa+.
Amazon's cost-saving efforts extended beyond software. Planning documents show the company evaluating both Nvidia GPUs and its own Trainium chips to further lower the cost of running Alexa+.
More broadly, the documents show Amazon treating frontier AI models and GPU capacity as expensive resources to be deployed selectively rather than by default.
That philosophy echoes a point CEO Andy Jassy has made publicly. In his shareholder letter last year, Jassy argued there's an "urgency" to make AI inference dramatically less expensive.
"Reducing the cost per unit in AI will unleash AI being used as expansively as customers desire, and also lead to more overall AI spending," Jassy wrote.
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Eugene is Business Insider’s Chief Tech Correspondent, where he leads coverage of Amazon. His reporting spans the company’s retail operations, AWS, Alexa, and its secretive internal work culture.Previously, he worked at CNBC, Fortune Magazine Korea, and Japan's Yomiuri Shimbun. He holds degrees from NYU and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.In 2022, Eugene broke a story uncovering Amazon’s practice of deceptively enrolling customers in Prime and deliberately making cancellation difficult. A year later, the Federal Trade Commission sued the company, citing his reporting. That case culminated in a record $2.5 billion settlement in 2025.His reporting has earned multiple honors, including the SF Press Club’s Bay Area Journalism Award and SPJ NorCal’s Excellence in Journalism Award.Eugene lives in the Bay Area. Contact him via email at [email protected], or Signal, Telegram, or WhatsApp at 650-942-3061. Use a personal email address, a nonwork WiFi network, and a nonwork device; here's our guide to sharing information securely. ExpertiseAmazon, Jeff Bezos, Andy Jassy, e-commerce, and cloud computing.Popular ArticlesAmazon:Internal Amazon emails give an exclusive look at how CEO Andy Jassy has started to run the company, with obsessive attention to the retail business and what some employees feel is micromanagingAndy Jassy will be the next CEO of Amazon. Insiders dish on what it's like to work for Jeff Bezos' successor, who built AWS into a $40 billion business.Internal documents show Amazon has for years knowingly tricked people into signing up for Prime subscriptions. 'We have been deliberately confusing,' former employee says.Inside Amazon's flailing brick-and-mortar ambitions: missed projections, pressure to cut costs, and a war with Whole FoodsInside Amazon's complex employee-review system, where workers feel left in the dark and managers expect to give 5% of reports bad reviewsAfter 28 years, 'Day 2' finally arrives at AmazonAWS, Alexa, healthcare:Inside Amazon's struggle to break into the lucrative market for SaaS business applications, including an internal pitch to buy $38 billion HubSpotInside Amazon's struggle to crack Nvidia's AI-chip dominanceAmazon's AI data center dream runs into the reality of 'zombie' facilities, higher costs, and labor shortagesAmazon is gutting its voice assistant, Alexa. Employees describe a division in crisis and huge losses on 'a wasted opportunity.'Amazon is working on a new 'Remarkable Alexa,' but internal politics and technical issues plague the projectAmazon projected huge losses from its healthcare business in 2024, but strong sales growth, internal document reveals
Amazon Alexa AI More AWS Anthropic Generative AI Exclusive
In the latest trading session, Amazon (AMZN - Free Report) closed at $244.85, marking a -1.09% move from the previous day. The stock trailed the S&P 500, which registered a daily loss of 0.14%. Elsewhere, the Dow lost 0.01%, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq lost 0.57%.
The online retailer's shares have seen an increase of 5.74% over the last month, surpassing the Retail-Wholesale sector's gain of 0.45% and the S&P 500's gain of 0.25%.
The investment community will be closely monitoring the performance of Amazon in its forthcoming earnings report. The company is scheduled to release its earnings on July 30, 2026. In that report, analysts expect Amazon to post earnings of $1.82 per share. This would mark year-over-year growth of 8.33%. Meanwhile, the latest consensus estimate predicts the revenue to be $196.85 billion, indicating a 17.38% increase compared to the same quarter of the previous year.
In terms of the entire fiscal year, the Zacks Consensus Estimates predict earnings of $8.93 per share and a revenue of $826.74 billion, indicating changes of +24.55% and +15.32%, respectively, from the former year.
Investors should also take note of any recent adjustments to analyst estimates for Amazon. These revisions help to show the ever-changing nature of near-term business trends. Hence, positive alterations in estimates signify analyst optimism regarding the business and profitability.
Our research reveals that these estimate alterations are directly linked with the stock price performance in the near future. To utilize this, we have created the Zacks Rank, a proprietary model that integrates these estimate changes and provides a functional rating system.
The Zacks Rank system, which varies between #1 (Strong Buy) and #5 (Strong Sell), carries an impressive track record of exceeding expectations, confirmed by external audits, with stocks at #1 delivering an average annual return of +25% since 1988. The Zacks Consensus EPS estimate has moved 0.49% higher within the past month. At present, Amazon boasts a Zacks Rank of #2 (Buy).
In the context of valuation, Amazon is at present trading with a Forward P/E ratio of 27.72. For comparison, its industry has an average Forward P/E of 17.14, which means Amazon is trading at a premium to the group.
Meanwhile, AMZN's PEG ratio is currently 1.6. This metric is used similarly to the famous P/E ratio, but the PEG ratio also takes into account the stock's expected earnings growth rate. As of the close of trade yesterday, the Internet - Commerce industry held an average PEG ratio of 1.12.
The Internet - Commerce industry is part of the Retail-Wholesale sector. This industry currently has a Zacks Industry Rank of 161, which puts it in the bottom 35% of all 250+ industries.
The Zacks Industry Rank gauges the strength of our industry groups by measuring the average Zacks Rank of the individual stocks within the groups. Our research shows that the top 50% rated industries outperform the bottom half by a factor of 2 to 1.
Don't forget to use Zacks.com to keep track of all these stock-moving metrics, and others, in the upcoming trading sessions.
Amazon Earnings: What Wall Street Will Be WatchingThe brokerage reiterated its Buy rating and $310 price forecast, citing improving AI positioning, accelerating AWS growth and continued momentum in generative AI services as potential catalysts for the stock in the second half of 2026.
Bank of America now expects Amazon to report second-quarter revenue of $198.8 billion and operating income of $24.1 billion, above Wall Street consensus estimates of $196.8 billion and $23.6 billion, respectively.
The firm also raised its AWS revenue growth forecast to 33% year over year, up from its prior estimate of 31%, driven by growing demand from Anthropic, OpenAI-powered Bedrock services and broader enterprise AI adoption.
AWS Growth Remains The Key FocusAnalysts expect Amazon’s third-quarter revenue guidance to range between $200.5 billion and $205.5 billion, roughly bracketing Street expectations.
They noted that an earlier-than-usual Prime Day will likely create a headwind for third-quarter retail comparisons after shifting some sales into the second quarter.
The firm said investors should focus less on headline earnings and more on AWS growth, cloud margins, AI backlog expansion and commentary around capital spending.
Bank of America believes Amazon’s cloud business continues to strengthen relative to competitors, supported by Bedrock adoption, Trainium chips and growing AI workloads.
AI Spending And Anthropic PartnershipThe brokerage also said Amazon could increase its 2026 capital expenditure outlook to about $210 billion because of higher memory costs and additional AI infrastructure investment.
While that could weigh on near-term sentiment, analysts said stronger cloud demand and improving AI monetization should outweigh those concerns over time.
Bank of America added that Amazon’s expanding relationship with Anthropic could further boost results. The firm estimates Anthropic-related workloads alone could contribute more than $1.5 billion in sequential AWS revenue growth during the quarter, while Amazon’s stake in the AI startup could generate a significant mark-to-market gain.
Wall Street Remains Bullish Ahead Of EarningsAmazon is scheduled to report second-quarter results on July 30.
Wall Street expects earnings of $1.82 per share, up from $1.68 a year earlier. Revenue is projected to reach $196.02 billion, compared with $167.70 billion in the prior-year quarter.
The stock trades at about 29.6 times forward earnings. Analysts maintain a Buy consensus rating with an average price forecast of $320.10. Recent analyst actions include:
Wells Fargo reiterated Overweight and raised its price forecast to $322 on July 21. KeyBanc maintained Overweight and increased its price forecast to $335 on July 16. Wedbush reiterated Outperform with a $293 price forecast on July 16. Amazon ETF ExposureAmazon is a major holding in several exchange-traded funds, including:
Large fund flows into or out of these ETFs can influence Amazon’s share price because of its significant portfolio weighting.
Amazon Price ActionAMZN Stock Price Activity: Amazon.com shares were down 1.47% at $243.91 at the time of publication on Wednesday, according to Benzinga Pro data.
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Item 1 of 2 The logo of Amazon is pictured at a company logistics center in Carquefou near Nantes, westren France, May 6, 2026. REUTERS/Stephane Mahe
[1/2]The logo of Amazon is pictured at a company logistics center in Carquefou near Nantes, westren France, May 6, 2026. REUTERS/Stephane Mahe Purchase Licensing Rights, opens new tab
SAN FRANCISCO, July 22 (Reuters) - Amazon (AMZN.O), opens new tab on Wednesday cut jobs in its artificial general intelligence group, marking the latest in a series of smaller reductions across the company since a much larger one in January.
Artificial general intelligence is a hypothetical AI system that surpasses human intelligence and can learn, grow and operate autonomously. Many of the top AI companies are working to develop similar systems, with the hope of deploying them to solve difficult problems.
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"We've been building large AI models for several years, and it remains one of the most important things we're working on," said an Amazon spokesman following a Reuters inquiry. "We’re sharpening our focus on the initiatives that matter most for customers, so we can move faster on what counts. That focus means some difficult decisions, including eliminating some roles within parts of our AGI organization."
Rohit Prasad, a top Amazon executive overseeing AGI, left the company at the end of last year and the head of its AGI Lab, David Luan, left in February. AGI work was consolidated under senior vice president Peter DeSantis in December as part of a larger group that also includes silicon development and quantum computing.
Employees under Adeeb Shanaa, vice president of artificial general intelligence data services, and Vishal Sharma, vice president of AGI information, reported being impacted by the cuts on online forums on Wednesday. However, the full scope of the cuts could not immediately be learned.
Amazon cut 16,000 jobs across the company in January.
Reporting by Greg Bensinger; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama, Kirsten Donovan
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab
Greg Bensinger joined Reuters as a technology correspondent in 2022 focusing on the world's largest technology companies. He was previously a member of The New York Times editorial board and a technology beat reporter for The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. He also worked for Bloomberg News writing about the auto and telecommunications industries. He studied English literature at The University of Virginia and graduate journalism at Columbia University. Greg lives in San Francisco with his wife and two children.
Amazon uzavřel s italskými odbory první celostátní kolektivní dohodu v zemi, která upravuje dovolenou, pracovní podmínky a video dohled na 57 pracovištích. Zahrnuje i rodičovskou dovolenou po hodinách.
Amazon logo outside an Amazon warehouse in Manchester, Britain, October 28, 2025. REUTERS/Phil Noble/File Photo Purchase Licensing Rights, opens new tab
CompaniesMILAN, July 22 (Reuters) - Italian unions have signed an agreement with Amazon.com (AMZN.O), opens new tab covering leave, employee rights and video surveillance, the unions and the U.S. e-commerce giant said on Wednesday.
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The Filt CGIL, Fit CISL and Uiltrasporti unions said 57 sites operating in Italy were covered in the deal struck with Amazon Italia Transport and Amazon Italia Logistica and hailed it as the first such national collective agreement reached with Amazon in any country.
Regarding video surveillance, the unions said it has been agreed that images cannot be used for disciplinary purposes.
Employees have been granted the right to take parental leave in increments as small as a single hour, the unions added.
"We welcome the agreement reached with trade unions, which introduces new flexibility and work-life balance tools and enhances existing ones, bringing them into a shared framework for the benefit of our employees and their families," Amazon said in a statement.
The agreement builds on an initial protocol signed with Amazon in 2021.
Amazon has 19,000 permanent employees in Italy.
Writing by Keith Weir, editing by Alvise Armellini
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab
Amazon je podle článku podhodnocený a těží z 28% meziročního růstu AWS v 1. čtvrtletí 2026, což odpovídá anualizovanému vyjádření 150 miliard USD. Trh ale dál řeší rekordní capex a tlak na volný peněžní tok.
At $254.96, Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN | AMZN Price Prediction) screens as undervalued. The stock has recovered 10.46% year to date while Wall Street debates whether $200 billion in annual capex is genius or lunacy. The fundamentals say genius.
Amazon runs the largest cloud infrastructure business on the planet, the largest online marketplace in the West, a $70 billion advertising engine, and a custom silicon operation that management says would generate a $50 billion run rate if sold standalone. AWS delivered 28% year-over-year growth in Q1 2026, the fastest pace in 15 quarters, on a $150 billion annualized base. The market prices this like a mature retailer, while the underlying business mix is a growth compounder.
Why Amazon Looks Cheap for What It Actually Is Custom silicon arbitrage: Trainium delivers about 30% better price performance than comparable GPUs, Trainium3 is nearly fully subscribed, and Amazon holds over $225 billion in Trainium revenue commitments. Jassy said at scale the program will deliver “tens of billions of dollars of CapEx” in savings each year plus several hundred basis points of margin advantage. Amazon is renting NVIDIA capacity to customers while stacking its own zero-marginal-cost silicon underneath.
Capex land grab: Prediction markets assign a 96.7% probability that 2026 capex clears $190 billion. That spend locks in multi-gigawatt commitments from OpenAI (2 GW of Trainium), Anthropic (up to 5 GW), and Meta. AWS backlog stands at $364 billion, excluding Anthropic’s $100 billion deal.
Bedrock as enterprise nervous system: It serves over 125,000 customers, nearly 80% of the Fortune 100, and processed more tokens in Q1 than all prior years combined. Customer spend grew 170% quarter over quarter.
The Bear Case: Cash Flow Is Cratering Trailing free cash flow collapsed 95% to $1.2 billion. Long-term debt jumped to $119.1 billion from $65.6 billion, and Amazon is tapping the bond market for at least $25 billion more. AWS operating margin compressed to 37.7% from 39.5%. Q1 net income was flattered by $16.8 billion in non-recurring Anthropic gains.
The Hold Case: Wait for the Capex Curve to Bend Amazon’s capex will not peak in 2026. Data-center leases take six to 24 months to monetize, and depreciation is front-loaded against ramping revenue. A patient investor could wait for the free cash flow inflection in 2027. The stock trades at a forward P/E of 29, not screamingly cheap, and one-year performance of 12.64% lags the S&P 500’s 21.32%.
What the Numbers Actually Say Amazon trades at $254.96 against an analyst consensus target of $314.27, implying roughly 23% upside. Coverage is deep with 66 analysts: 15 Strong Buy, 47 Buy, 4 Hold, and zero Sell ratings. Year to date AMZN is up 10.46% against the S&P 500’s 10.69%, matching the index despite the heaviest capex load in the sector.
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The trailing P/E of 29 sits near a decade low. Jefferies named Amazon its top hyperscaler pick with a $320 target.
The Setup: A Rare Configuration at a Reasonable Multiple At $254.96, Amazon looks mispriced relative to its growth profile.
The path to appreciation is mechanical. AWS is compounding 28% on a $150 billion base, Trainium demand is contractually locked through Trainium4 in 2027, and Bedrock is the default AI stack for 80% of the Fortune 100. That combination usually commands a premium multiple. Amazon currently trades at a discount to peers with slower growth profiles.
A P/E of 29 on a business growing operating income 29.6% with a $364 billion visible backlog is asymmetric. Downside is bounded by prediction-market conviction that shares hold the $240 to $245 range with better than 90% probability, while the consensus target implies 23% upside.
What invalidates the thesis: an AWS deceleration below 20%, margin compression through 35%, or evidence that Trainium bookings are slipping. None of that is currently visible.
Amazon is spending like a monopolist because it is building one, and the market is still pricing it like a retailer.
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Amazon čeká, že AWS ve 2. čtvrtletí zrychlí růst tržeb na 35,5 % meziročně. To by podle TD Cowen potvrdilo, že investice do AI infrastruktury už se promítají do výnosů.
This is a fair market value price provided by Massive. Learn more.
52-Week Range$196.00▼
$278.56P/E Ratio30.20
Price Target$312.76
For most of this year, the conversation around Amazon.com Inc. NASDAQ: AMZN has been dominated by one uncomfortable question: Will all that AI spending ever pay off? The company's enormous infrastructure buildout has compressed free cash flow, unsettled the bond market, and left investors waiting for hard evidence that the money is translating into growth.
That wait may be about to end. Ahead of its next earnings report on July 30, some analysts are forecasting a sharp acceleration in AWS revenue growth, comfortably outpacing the wider market expectations. If the numbers land anywhere close to that, it would be exactly the proof point the bulls have been asking for.
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The Forecast That Changes the ConversationIn a note to clients earlier this month, TD Cowen said it expects AWS revenue growth to reach 35.5% year over year in the second quarter, up from 28.4% in the same period last year and several percentage points above consensus estimates. For a business of AWS's scale, that kind of acceleration is remarkable, and it would mark a decisive break from the narrative that cloud growth had plateaued.
The driver capacity is finally catching up with demand. Amazon's heavy investment in AI infrastructure has begun easing the supply constraints that were holding it back, meaning capacity that simply wasn't available before is now coming online and converting directly into revenue from generative AI workloads.
That distinction matters enormously. The bear case has long held that Amazon was spending speculatively into an uncertain future. An AWS acceleration of this magnitude, arriving now rather than in a year or two's time, would suggest the opposite: that the company has been building to meet demand it could already see.
Why This Would Settle a Bigger ArgumentOverall MarketRank™95th Percentile
Analyst RatingModerate Buy
Upside/Downside25.0% Upside
Short Interest LevelHealthy
Dividend StrengthN/A
News Sentiment0.79 Insider TradingSelling Shares
Proj. Earnings Growth30.45%
See Full Analysis
To understand why a single quarter could carry this much weight, it helps to remember what the debate has actually been about. Nobody has seriously questioned whether AI infrastructure demand exists. The question has been whether Amazon specifically can convert its spending into revenue fast enough to justify the pressure it has been putting on the balance sheet.
Free cash flow has taken a visible hit as capital expenditure (CapEx) has climbed, and the company's recent bond raise drew noticeably softer demand than earlier rounds of AI-related debt issuance. Both of those are symptoms of a market that wants to see returns before it extends more patience.
An AWS growth number in the mid-thirties would go a long way toward providing them. It would demonstrate that the capacity being built is consumed almost as quickly as it comes online, reframing the CapEx story from a worrying outflow to an investment with a visible payback.
The Retail Engine Is Quietly Accelerating TooLost in all the focus on cloud is the fact that Amazon's core retail business appears to be picking up pace as well. TD Cowen expects North American revenue growth to come in meaningfully ahead of the first-quarter result, driven by faster delivery speeds and continued strength in everyday essentials.
That matters more than it might first appear. One of the quieter concerns about the AI buildout has been whether it would distract management from the business that actually funds it. An acceleration on the retail side would suggest the opposite: that Amazon is running both playbooks at once without either suffering for it.
It also speaks to the durability of the wider growth opportunity. AWS may be where the excitement sits, but Amazon’s retail and logistics operations remain the foundation on which everything else is built, and evidence that it's strengthening rather than plateauing gives the bulls another reason to be excited ahead of the report.
What Could Still Go Wrong on July 30To be sure, none of this anticipated upside surprise is guaranteed, and the report could still disappoint even with strong AWS numbers. The most obvious is on the spending side. If capital expenditure guidance climbs again, or if management signals that the buildout will run longer and heavier than expected, investors may focus on cash outflows rather than revenue acceleration.
Margins are the other variable. Rapid AWS growth is only bullish if it comes with the profitability the market associates with the segment, and any sign that the cost of serving AI workloads is compressing returns would take the shine off the headline number.
Get both right, though, and the setup is compelling. A market that has spent months worrying about what Amazon is spending would suddenly be confronted with clear evidence of what that spending is buying. After months of frustrating price action, that could easily be enough to push the stock back toward all-time highs.
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The AI wave will soon hit public markets with Anthropic and OpenAI set to go public later this year. However, you don't have to wait to invest. This report shows seven AI stocks that you can buy today while the big model providers get ready to go public.
Amazon plánuje v roce 2026 investovat zhruba 200 miliard USD do AI a Andy Jassy říká, že nejde o sázku „naslepo“. Opírá se o Trainium, které běží nad ročním tempem výnosů 20 miliard USD a má přes 225 miliard USD v závazcích.
When a company announces the largest single-year infrastructure spend in corporate history, investors are right to get nervous. Amazon (AMZN 0.91%) plans to pour roughly $200 billion into capital spending in 2026, most of it aimed at artificial intelligence (AI), and CEO Andy Jassy knows how that sounds.
His response was blunt: The company is not making that bet "on a hunch." The clearest evidence that he is telling the truth sits inside Amazon's own chip business.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy. Image source: Amazon.
The proof is in the chips Amazon designs its own AI chips, led by a line called Trainium, and that custom silicon operation has quietly become a real business. It recently exited a quarter at an annual revenue pace above $20 billion, and this segment of the overall business is growing at triple-digit percentages. It is one of the fastest-scaling chip operations anywhere.
Even more telling is how much future demand is already locked in. Amazon says it has more than $225 billion in revenue commitments tied to Trainium alone, with major AI developers signing on for substantial capacity.
When customers commit that kind of money in advance, it tells you the spending is chasing real, contracted demand rather than a guess about what might sell someday. That is what Jassy is saying.
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Why Trainium matters beyond the revenue The chips do something else that helps the math work. Amazon's newer Trainium processors offer meaningfully better performance for the price than the third-party graphics chips most companies rent, and recent versions have largely sold out. By using its own silicon rather than buying everything from Nvidia, Amazon can lower its costs and widen its profit margins over time.
In other words, the $200 billion is not only about serving customers but also about building a cheaper, more controlled AI supply chain that Amazon owns end-to-end.
None of this makes the bet safe -- $200 billion is an extraordinary sum, and Amazon is counting on monetizing much of it in 2027 and beyond, so the payoff is not immediate. If AI demand cools or customers delay, that spending could weigh on profits. Competition from Nvidia and other cloud providers is fierce, and building chips is hard.
Amazon's AI spending is enormous, but it is backed by a chip business already running at a $20 billion pace and a mountain of pre-committed revenue. To me, that turns a scary headline number into something closer to a calculated bet. The spending still has to pay off, but Jassy has given investors real reasons to believe it is grounded in demand rather than hope.
Elon Musk přiznal, že se v Anthropic mýlil, a označil ji za současného lídra v AI. Pro Amazon a Alphabet to posiluje hodnotu jejich podílů i budoucích zakázek na cloud a čipy.
Elon Musk doesn't hand out compliments to rivals often, which is why his recent about-face turned heads. After dismissing the AI start-up Anthropic last year, Musk posted that he "was clearly wrong" and now considers it "obviously currently the leader in AI," praising its latest Claude models as the strongest yet. That is a striking admission from a competitor. But the investors who should really pay attention are not watching Musk. They are shareholders of Amazon (AMZN 0.91%) and Alphabet (GOOGL 2.05%).
Musk had written a year ago that "winning was never in the set of possible outcomes for Anthropic." Reversing that in public, and calling Anthropic the outright leader, is the kind of validation money can't easily buy. It came after Anthropic raised an enormous funding round and shipped models that impressed even skeptics. When the person running a competing AI lab concedes your product is the best, the market listens.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Image source: The White House.
Why Amazon and Alphabet are the real winners Here's the connection most headlines miss: Amazon and Alphabet are two of Anthropic's largest backers. Alphabet owns roughly 14% of the company, and Amazon holds a stake in the mid- to high teens, positions each worth well over $100 billion at Anthropic's latest valuation near $965 billion. Amazon alone had committed around $33 billion, with a pledge to invest tens of billions more as milestones are hit. If Anthropic is truly the AI leader, those stakes could swell further, especially with the company reportedly heading toward a blockbuster IPO.
The equity is only half the story, though. Anthropic has committed to spending more than $100 billion on Amazon Web Services over the next decade, including heavy use of Amazon's custom Trainium chips, and roughly $200 billion on Google Cloud over five years, potentially leaning on Alphabet's own AI accelerators. So both giants win twice: their investment appreciates, and the AI leader becomes an anchor customer funneling tens of billions into their cloud businesses. That is a rare double benefit, and Musk's endorsement only strengthens the case that Anthropic will keep growing into those commitments.
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The catch investors should weigh I wouldn't get carried away, though, because there's a real wrinkle here. A large chunk of the eye-popping "AI profits" Amazon and Alphabet have reported recently came from marking up the value of their Anthropic stakes, not from selling more products. Amazon booked billions in pretax gains in a single quarter simply because Anthropic's paper valuation rose. Paper gains are nice, but they aren't the same as durable operating earnings, and they can reverse just as quickly if the AI mood sours.
There's also a whiff of circularity worth acknowledging. Amazon and Alphabet invest in Anthropic, and Anthropic turns around and spends that money on their cloud services and chips. That can inflate everyone's numbers in the good times, but it also means the whole arrangement leans on a continuation of the AI boom. Anthropic itself is still spending enormously and is not a mature, profitable business. And its nearly $1 trillion private valuation leaves little room for disappointment.
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The takeaway for investors Musk's admission is more than a bit of tech-world drama. It's a high-profile confirmation that Anthropic, a company quietly underpinning two of the market's biggest stocks, is winning. For Amazon and Alphabet shareholders, that means their exposure to the AI race runs deeper than the chatbots and cloud tools you can see, extending into a stake that could be worth hundreds of billions and a customer relationship worth hundreds of billions more.
My honest take is that this is a genuine, underappreciated strength for both companies, but investors should hold it in perspective. Enjoy the upside from owning a piece of the AI leader, while remembering that a big slice of the recent gains are marks on paper, not cash in the bank. The businesses underneath still have to deliver.
Amazon prodal dluhopisy za 25 miliard USD na financování výstavby datových center a dává tím jasně najevo, že sází na rozvoj AI. Firma zároveň plánuje letos investice do datových center za 200 miliard USD.
Amazon (AMZN 0.90%) just completed a large bond sale, and it's a direct sign of where CEO Andy Jassy is pointing the company. Amazon sold $25 billion worth of bonds to finance its data center build-out, telling investors it's going all in on the artificial intelligence (AI) build-out.
This is a big deal because there have been some concerns proliferating over the past month about the health of the AI build-out trend. This bond sale is a solid indicator that the trend is robust, so investors can refocus on what Amazon's future will look like as an AI-first infrastructure company.
Image source: Amazon.com Inc.
Jassy has some insight into what's coming In Jassy's annual letter to investors, he made the case for Amazon spending $200 billion on data center capital expenditures this year. One major factor he discussed was that the faster a cloud computing business grows, the more money it has to spend to build the data centers and purchase the chips necessary to run the workloads. Plus, he reiterated that Amazon's investments aren't being made on blind faith; the company has secured several data center clients that will start using the new computing capacity being developed the first day it's available.
That should calm investors' nerves a bit, as Amazon is doing everything right to secure a long-term opportunity in the cloud computing market.
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Another factor that could set Amazon apart is its custom AI chips. Amazon Web Services (AWS) has already been successful in developing in-house Graviton central processing units (CPUs) for data centers, and its Trainium chips could also be a huge advantage, as Amazon has touted their cost effectiveness over graphics processing units for AI training workloads. It can't fully finance its ambitious expansion plans with its current cash flows, so Amazon is doing the right thing by issuing debt to secure this opportunity, even if some investors don't like it.
However, with Amazon becoming a more cloud-focused business, the stock looks even more attractive.
AWS' operating margins are far superior to those of Amazon's commerce divisions. This is evidenced by the fact that AWS accounted for 59% of operating profit in the first quarter, despite making up only 21% of revenue. As this division grows faster on the back of the company's increasingly large capital investments, Amazon's profits will likely soar, making the stock a no-brainer buy at today's levels. I think that Amazon's transformation into a cloud-focused business will surprise a lot of investors, and that the upside in the stock is real and immense.
Keithen Drury has positions in Amazon. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Amazon. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
Zoox stáhla aktualizaci softwaru u 105 robotaxi poté, co její vůz v Las Vegas nezachytil hustý kouř a vjel do aktivní zásahové scény. Firma uvedla, že šlo o jediný takový případ a nikdo nebyl zraněn.
Amazon-owned Zoox recalled software in 105 of its robotaxis over concerns its vehicles failed to detect heavy smoke and drove into it.
Zoox notified the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration of the recall on July 8 and said it became aware of the smoke detection issue following an incident last month.
On June 20, an unoccupied Zoox robotaxi encountered heavy smoke that obscured an active emergency fire scene that was not cordoned off with cones, the company wrote in its report. The vehicle entered the scene, then braked hard while attempting to steer away before coming to a stop, Zoox said.
The company said the incident took place in Las Vegas.
A Zoox teleguidance employee instructed the vehicle to reverse, then first responders placed traffic cones to block off the scene, according to the report.
Zoox said it investigated the incident and determined it's "the only event of this kind" that has occurred. No injuries were identified.
Read more CNBC tech newsElon Musk's Memphis AI empire is the epicenter of the data center backlashChinese startup Moonshot AI unveils Kimi model it says rivals OpenAI, AnthropicSpaceX stock falls after Starship test flight abortedMicrosoft's Nadella criticizes Anthropic's Fable for being 'editorially controlled'Amazon acquired Zoox for $1.3 billion in 2020. The company operates driverless buggies that have no steering wheel or pedals, and feature four carriage-style seats that face inward, giving them a shuttle-like atmosphere.
Zoox currently offers free rides in parts of Las Vegas and San Francisco, and it's allowing select users to hail its robotaxis in small zones in Miami and Austin, Texas. Testing is also underway in six other U.S. cities.
The voluntary recall comes after NHTSA Administrator Jonathan Morrison last week issued a directive to autonomous vehicle developers to ensure their vehicles get out of the way of first responders.
Morrison said in the letter that the agency has "identified a clear pattern of driverless AVs interfering with law enforcement and other first responders," citing incidents where AVs drove into active emergency scenes, blocked the paths of ambulances or firefighters, or failed to recognize or respond to flashing lights, flares, smoke, fire and traffic cones.
He called on AV developers and operators "to immediately focus their resources on fixing this issue" and present their solutions to the agency by the end of the month. The letter doesn't name specific AV companies.
Zoox issued several software recalls last year to address issues over lane crossings, as well as its ability to predict the movement of other vehicles and pedestrians.
The company is racing to catch up to Alphabet's Waymo, which is the dominant robotaxi service in the U.S., with a fleet of about 4,000 automated vehicles in the country.
Last month, Waymo recalled about 3,900 robotaxis after some of its vehicles drove into closed construction zones on freeways, increasing "the risk of a crash."
Amazon uvedl, že opravuje chybu v AWS fakturačním portálu, která některým zákazníkům zobrazila účty v řádu milionů nebo miliard dolarů. Podle firmy nejde o skutečné využití ani poplatky.
Image Credits:TechCrunch Some Amazon cloud customers woke up on Friday to a surprise bill estimate that said they owed billions of dollars for cloud services they had never used.
Amazon confirmed on Friday that it’s trying to resolve a bug in its Amazon Web Services (AWS) billing portal that showed some customers “owed” millions or billions in cloud computing costs.
In an update on its status page, Amazon said it began seeing inaccurate billing data as of late Thursday. But by Friday morning, the company conceded that the “rollback of a recent change did not resolve the issue.” Amazon said the change relates to its billing computation subsystem.
The good news for the customers who were told they “owe” millions or billions to Amazon is they are likely off the hook. The billing estimates “do not reflect actual usage and charges,” Amazon said.
According to several screenshots posted by Amazon customers on Reddit, one customer was quoted a billing estimate of close to $2.5 billion for this month’s AWS usage, while others had similar alerts, ranging from a few million dollars to hundreds of millions of dollars.
A spokesperson for Amazon did not immediately return a request for comment. The issue is expected to last several more hours, per Amazon’s status page.
Amazon stock has struggled to keep pace with the broader market this year as investor sentiment toward hyperscalers has cooled. AMZN is up about 8% year to date and just 10% over the past 12 months, lagging many large-cap peers.
However, the stock could regain momentum later this year if investors rotate back into hyperscalers amid renewed optimism about AI spending, cloud growth, and earnings.
AMZN stock price has underperformed the market this year as investors remained concerned about its spending and whether it will achieve a return on investment (ROI).
The company has been spending billions of dollars in data centers. It plans to spend over $200 billion this year, a figure that may continue growing as memory, servers, and chip prices surge.
The next key catalyst for the company is its earnings, which are expected to come out on July 30th. These earnings will provide an overview of how its business performed last quarter, and whether its cloud business is still growing.
The last financial results showed that its sales jumped by 17% in the first quarter to $181 billion. Excluding its forex benefits, the company’s sales rose by 15% from the same period last year.
By segment, is international sales rose by 19%, while AWS jumped by 28% to $37.8 billion. Its North America segment jumped by 12% to $104 billion, as retail spending growth continued.
Most notably, despite its strong spending, Amazon’s operating income rose to over $23.9 billion, with AWS leading the pack with $14.2 billion. However, the key blemish in the report was its free cash flow, which plunged to $1.2 billion in the trailing twelve months as it boosted its spending.
There were a few notable statements in the report. For one, the company’s chip business, which is made up of Graviton, Terranium, and Nitro, made $20 billion in annual revenue run rate. It also inked a deal with OpenAI to consumer about 2 GW of Tranium capacity.
The upcoming earnings report is expected to show that revenue jumped by 16.8% in the second quarter to over $195 billion. Notably, the IWS division is expected to grow by about 25% as the company’s market share in the cloud computing sector remains.
For the year, the company’s revenue is expected to grow by 15% to $823 billion, followed by $930 billion next year.
There are signs that the company has become highly overvalued, with the forward price-to-earnings ratio hitting 29. Its multiple is much higher than the sector median of 15.
Most Wall Street analysts remain bullish on Amazon stock. The average price target is $312, implying about 25% upside from the current level. Among the most optimistic forecasts, KeyCorp has a $335 target.
Meanwhile, Wedbush, Citigroup, and Citizens maintain Outperform, Buy, and Market Outperform ratings, respectively, reflecting continued confidence in the company's long-term growth prospects.
READ MORE: Is Big Tech's $725B AI splurge being funded by mass layoffs?
AMZN stock chart | Source: TradingView
The daily chart shows that the AMZN stock has crawled back in the past few days, moving from a low of $225 earlier this month to the current $250. It has already crossed the 50-day and 100-day moving average and formed an inverted head-and-shoulders pattern.
It is also hovering around the 23.6% Fibonacci Retracement level. Therefore, the stock will likely bounce back in the near term as investors start rotating from memory and semiconductor companies to hyperscalers. If this happens, the next key target to watch will be the year-to-date high of $278.
Amazon (AMZN 1.99%) CEO Andy Jassy put a striking number on one of his company's least-discussed businesses this spring. If Amazon's in-house chip operation were a stand-alone company that sold the chips it produces to outside buyers, he said on the company's first-quarter earnings call in April, its annual revenue run rate would be about $50 billion.
The business as it actually runs today is no small thing either. Amazon's custom chip unit -- Graviton processors, Trainium artificial intelligence (AI) accelerators, and Nitro networking chips, all deployed inside Amazon Web Services (AWS) -- has an annual revenue run rate above $20 billion, growing at triple-digit percentage rates year over year.
And customers have lined up. Jassy said in the company's first-quarter earnings call that it now holds more than $225 billion in revenue commitments for Trainium.
Numbers like those suggest Amazon is building something bigger than an internal cost-saving project. Here's a closer look at the chip business, and what it could mean for the stock.
Image source: Amazon.com Inc.
A $20 billion business inside AWS Amazon's chips business grew nearly 40% quarter over quarter in the first quarter alone, Jassy said on the earnings call. And as best the company can tell, he added, its custom silicon operation is now "one of the top three data center chip businesses in the world."
The $225 billion commitment figure comes with recognizable names attached. Amazon's first-quarter report disclosed a commitment from OpenAI to consume approximately two gigawatts of Trainium capacity beginning in 2027, and an agreement under which Anthropic will secure up to five gigawatts of current and future generations of Trainium chips. Uber is using Graviton chips to match riders with drivers. And Meta Platforms signed on to deploy tens of millions of Graviton cores.
Demand is running ahead of supply, too.
"Our Trainium2 chip has about 30% better price-performance than comparable GPUs, and has largely sold out," Jassy said on the call. Trainium3, which started shipping at the beginning of 2026, is nearly fully subscribed. And much of Trainium4, still more than a year from broad availability, has already been reserved.
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A challenger to Nvidia, within limits Of course, Nvidia is still much bigger. Its graphics processing units (GPUs) dominate AI data centers, and Amazon itself remains a huge Nvidia customer -- the same first-quarter report that touted Trainium also announced plans to deploy more than 1 million Nvidia GPUs starting in 2026.
Trainium's selling point is cost per unit of computing, and Amazon offers its chips only through AWS.
Jassy's $50 billion figure is also a hypothetical. It describes what the business would look like if Amazon sold its chips on the open market the way other chipmakers do, which today it mostly doesn't. Amazon doesn't break out the unit's profits, either, so investors can't yet see what all this silicon earns.
But the chip momentum sits inside a cloud business that is accelerating. AWS revenue grew 20% for all of 2025, then 24% in the fourth quarter, then 28% in the first quarter of 2026, reaching $37.6 billion -- growth Jassy called the segment's fastest in 15 quarters. AWS also produced $14.2 billion of operating income in the first quarter, up 23% from $11.5 billion a year earlier.
That growth is expensive. Amazon expects about $200 billion in capital expenditures across the company in 2026, and its free cash flow for the trailing 12 months fell to $1.2 billion from $25.9 billion a year earlier as AI investments ramped up.
The spending is the main risk here. If demand for AI computing cools before these investments pay for themselves, Amazon's profits and its stock could suffer.
Still, the stock arguably isn't asking investors to pay much for the chip business. At about $255 per share as of this writing, Amazon trades at about 30 times earnings, though earnings get a boost from a $16.8 billion pre-tax gain on the company's Anthropic investment booked in the first quarter. Excluding it, the multiple would be somewhat higher. Even so, shares are up a modest 10% or so this year while AWS accelerates.
Ultimately, I don't think Trainium needs to beat Nvidia for Amazon shareholders to win. A chip business with a $20 billion run rate, triple-digit growth, and $225 billion in commitments strengthens the case for a stock priced like this while its biggest profit engine accelerates. I already liked Amazon at this price. The chip business is one more reason.
AWS v 1. čtvrtletí zvýšila tržby meziročně o 28 % a backlog vzrostl na 364 miliard USD, tedy o 49 % oproti předchozím třem měsícům. Amazon letos plánuje kapitálové výdaje ve výši 200 miliard USD.
Amazon (AMZN 1.92%) brought in a jaw-dropping $182 billion in revenue in the first three months of 2026. While the majority of this sum came from its retail operations, the market undoubtedly spends more time focused on the company's cloud division, Amazon Web Services (AWS).
This isn't surprising. AWS posted a 28% year-over-year revenue gain in Q1, its fastest growth pace in more than three years. And AWS' operating income accounts for 59% of the overall company's total. These are impressive trends.
But investors should take a deeper look at the AWS growth story.
Image source: Amazon.
Double-click on the backlog metric Andy Jassy, who has been CEO of Amazon since taking over from founder Jeff Bezos in July 2021, highlighted the huge opportunity that the cloud segment is facing. As he wrote in his 2025 shareholder letter, "85% of global IT spend remains on-premises."
In recent years, the artificial intelligence (AI) market has taken a central position in the financial picture. "Our AI revenue is growing triple digits year over year," Chief Financial Officer Brian T. Olsavsky said on the Q1 earnings call. It's hard not to be bullish about the company after reading this.
The market places a lot of attention on a single metric for cloud computing leaders like Amazon: backlog, which indicates contracted (but not yet delivered) demand from customers. AWS had a $364 billion backlog as of March 31, up 49% from three months before.
And that figure didn't include the 10-year $100 billion deal with Anthropic signed in April. But it did include OpenAI's $138 billion spending commitment over the next eight years. These are the two most prominent AI labs out there, and both are weighing initial public offerings that would value the companies at more than $1 trillion.
The outlook for AWS is highly reliant on the ability of these two start-ups to fulfill their spending commitments. This puts its backlog on shakier ground.
As of May, Anthropic and OpenAI had a combined annualized revenue run rate of $72 billion. Their total yearly spending commitment to AWS of about $27 billion amounts to 38% of this sales figure. This isn't a cause for concern at first glance.
However, this doesn't count their spending obligations with other cloud providers, measured in the hundreds of billions of dollars. It also excludes operating expenses and the need to eventually produce a profit. There is tremendous uncertainty in the coming years, all dependent upon the ability of Anthropic and OpenAI to register skyrocketing revenues and build durable business models.
Amazon
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Say goodbye to free cash flow Amazon has said it will lay out $200 billion on capital expenditures this year, up 52% compared to 2025. The company will burn $11 billion in free cash flow in 2026, according to analysts' consensus estimates. Investors have to get used to this new financial reality.
On a positive note, Amazon has historically excelled at choosing where to invest with an eye toward the long term. Additionally, the sizable investments it's making could also benefit the overall business. The online marketplace, logistics network, Prime Video, and advertising segment, for example, are all leveraging its expanded AI capabilities.
AMZN stock is moving. See the chart and price action here. AMZN – Overweight, $335 Price TargetIn a new note, the firm reiterates its Overweight rating on Amazon and nudges its price target up to $335 from $330, based on 25.5 times 2028 earnings, as it extends its valuation horizon and edges estimates above consensus into 2028.
At the center of the call is a simple trade‑off: KeyBanc sees near‑term margin pressure as the cost of entrenching AWS as a primary supplier of scarce AI compute.
The analysts raise 2026 and 2027 total net sales by less than 1% but mark AWS meaningfully higher, modeling 31% year‑over‑year growth in both years, versus Street expectations closer to the low‑30s.
The analysts also lift 2026 and 2027 operating income by 4% and 8%, respectively, and introduce 2028 projections that put revenue at about $1.08 trillion and operating income at roughly $178.6 billion.
Capex is where the call diverges sharply from consensus. Management has already signaled that faster AWS growth requires more up‑front spending, and KeyBanc leans into that message, penciling in 2027 and 2028 capital expenditures of $331 billion and $356 billion.
That compares with Street estimates of $235 billion and $241 billion, implying KeyBanc is underwriting a materially steeper investment curve as Amazon races to build data centers and secure power for AI workloads.
AWS Backlog SwellsThe firm ties that capex stance directly to a swelling AWS backlog and a series of long‑dated power and capacity deals. It expects AWS backlog to reach around $485 billion, driven largely by a $100 billion, 10‑year agreement signed with Anthropic in April.
Additional commitments from OpenAI and Anthropic — 2GW of power over eight years and 5GW over 10 years, respectively — are framed as structural demand signals, reinforcing the view that incremental compute remains both scarce and valuable.
The TakeawayIn that context, Amazon’s spend‑now posture becomes a rational strategy to deepen an AI infrastructure moat, even if it compresses near‑term margin upside.
KeyBanc’s message to investors: tolerate the capex surge and focus on what the firm sees as a durable, high‑growth AWS earnings stream stretching toward the end of the decade.
Photo: PJ McDonnell / Shutterstock
This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors.
Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs
Amazon testuje software pro řízení směn ve skladech, ale část manažerů jeho doporučení obchází a žádá vypnutí automatických kontrol. Firma přesto plánuje širší nasazení napříč desítkami severoamerických fulfillment a sort center a do roku 2026 tvrdší vynucování.
An Amazon fulfillment center Bloomberg/Getty Images Amazon is testing software to decide where warehouse workers should go. Some managers keep ignoring it.
Internal planning documents show the tech giant intends to expand these labor-management systems across dozens of its North American fulfillment centers and sort centers, where they could save hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
However, some warehouse managers have been overriding the software recommendations, asking engineers to disable automated features, and finding other ways around the systems, according to internal Slack conversations and the documents from earlier this year.
The pushback has been enough for Amazon to conclude that software recommendations alone aren't enough to get the new technology working as designed.
"Providing managers with optimized recommendations is necessary but insufficient," Amazon said in one of the documents. "Without system-enforced guardrails, manual overrides and habits erode even the best science."
The conflict highlights a broader challenge in automating warehouse management: software can make decisions, but people still have to follow the guidance. The documents and internal communications reviewed by Business Insider suggest getting managers to trust the software, and ultimately defer to its decisions, is proving more difficult than Amazon expected.
Competing philosophiesAmazon uses a growing mix of machine learning, computer vision, and other AI tools that increasingly guide staffing decisions traditionally made by managers.
Initially, those systems functioned as advisory tools. A program called DOPLERS calculates staffing plans, Full Facility Load Balancing recommends labor moves, and Right Link Station automatically tracks and captures check-in data for support staff.
But the internal documents reviewed by Business Insider show Amazon came to see manager discretion as an obstacle.
"Algorithm accuracy cannot be meaningfully measured without enforcement," one of the documents stated.
The documents reveal two competing philosophies of warehouse management. Some managers believe warehouses are still too dynamic for algorithms to understand every situation. Amazon, however, saw that too much human judgment prevented those algorithms from working as intended.
As a result, Amazon's strategy evolved to broader tracking of overrides and stricter enforcement planned over time.
"Hard enforcement is the end goal for 2026," one planning document stated.
"Iterate on the logic"
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy Bloomberg/Getty Images In an email ahead of publication, an Amazon spokesperson called this story's premise "wrong," saying the company is only piloting the technology at a small number of US facilities to help managers adjust staffing as package volumes change.
Managers still make staffing decisions, the spokesperson added, while the software system provides "better information" and is being refined based on testing and employee feedback before any broader rollout.
"As with all new systems, we continuously iterate on the logic — it takes time, testing, and iteration to get there — which is why it's inappropriate to draw broad conclusions during initial testing phases," the spokesperson said. "We always want to learn what's working for our employees, and what isn't, so we can make adjustments to get things right. That's what pilots are all about."
The spokesperson said the quotes and sentiments cited in the story came from an "early-stage planning document" that captured anecdotal observations during a pilot and "don't reflect how the system operates today." The issues were "not a widespread or ongoing concern," the spokesperson said, adding that the tools are intended to help managers make more consistent staffing decisions, not replace their judgment.
An Amazon spokesperson previously told Business Insider that broader expansion plans remain subject to change and that projected savings estimates are hypothetical because the systems are still being tested.
"Please turn if off"Still, the documents and internal communications reviewed by Business Insider suggest a deeper disagreement over who should make staffing decisions inside Amazon's warehouses.
Some managers often wanted to keep more workers assigned to their areas to maintain productivity or because they believed operations required more staffing than the software recommended, according to Slack messages from inside Amazon that were obtained by Business Insider.
Several managers overstaffed warehouse support roles and "hid hours through manual time edits," as some sites found "loopholes," Amazon said in the official internal documents.
The Amazon spokesperson told Business Insider that managers make staffing decisions based on what the company has learned about shopping patterns over the years, but "there will always be variations."
Internal Amazon Slack conversations from earlier this year show some managers at the company repeatedly asking to disable some of the automated staffing controls, or give warehouse leaders authority to do it themselves.
"Please turn it off now and I will explain," one warehouse manager wrote shortly after Amazon's enforcement effort launched at an early test site.
Minutes later, an Amazon product manager replied, "We will disable enforcement for now."
Some managers argued the software often lacked the context they had on the warehouse floor, noting that the system overreacted to a brief slowdown in package volume, recommending staffing cuts that didn't reflect real-time conditions.
Other managers complained the system pulled workers away from urgent areas, prevented them from reassigning idle employees, or left workers temporarily locked out of new assignments while different systems synchronized.
One manager said automated staffing changes caused packages to repeatedly circulate through the warehouse instead of being processed the first time, prompting a request to "disable the system until it gets fixed."
Another manager questioned whether the software could account for differences between workers. "Does it understand 6 foot three Henry that weighs 250 pounds is way better at chasing than 67-year old Henrietta that weighs under 100 pounds and doesn't reach 5 foot?" this person wrote in Amazon's internal Slack.
The Amazon spokesperson told Business Insider that the Slack channel included a "small handful of managers" and the comments "don't reflect the current state of the technology, since they're from a channel that was intended to provide constructive feedback on this initial pilot."
Amazon wants to double downThe conflict reveals something larger than a disagreement over warehouse software.
Historically, supervisors balanced labor using experience and local knowledge. Amazon wants software to make more of these decisions.
The official internal documents show Amazon interpreted manager workarounds less as evidence that automation had limits than as proof that recommendations alone wouldn't change behavior.
Internal Amazon roadmaps call for progressively tighter controls, including limits on how far managers can deviate from the algorithm. Amazon's own "Success Metrics" for 2026 mention a "reduction in manual staffing interventions by managers."
"Enforcement is our highest-leverage mechanism and we're doubling down," Amazon stated in one of the documents.
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Eugene Kim You're currently following this author! Want to unfollow? Unsubscribe via the link in your email.
Eugene is Business Insider’s Chief Tech Correspondent, where he leads coverage of Amazon. His reporting spans the company’s retail operations, AWS, Alexa, and its secretive internal work culture.Previously, he worked at CNBC, Fortune Magazine Korea, and Japan's Yomiuri Shimbun. He holds degrees from NYU and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.In 2022, Eugene broke a story uncovering Amazon’s practice of deceptively enrolling customers in Prime and deliberately making cancellation difficult. A year later, the Federal Trade Commission sued the company, citing his reporting. That case culminated in a record $2.5 billion settlement in 2025.His reporting has earned multiple honors, including the SF Press Club’s Bay Area Journalism Award and SPJ NorCal’s Excellence in Journalism Award.Eugene lives in the Bay Area. Contact him via email at [email protected], or Signal, Telegram, or WhatsApp at 650-942-3061. Use a personal email address, a nonwork WiFi network, and a nonwork device; here's our guide to sharing information securely. ExpertiseAmazon, Jeff Bezos, Andy Jassy, e-commerce, and cloud computing.Popular ArticlesAmazon:Internal Amazon emails give an exclusive look at how CEO Andy Jassy has started to run the company, with obsessive attention to the retail business and what some employees feel is micromanagingAndy Jassy will be the next CEO of Amazon. Insiders dish on what it's like to work for Jeff Bezos' successor, who built AWS into a $40 billion business.Internal documents show Amazon has for years knowingly tricked people into signing up for Prime subscriptions. 'We have been deliberately confusing,' former employee says.Inside Amazon's flailing brick-and-mortar ambitions: missed projections, pressure to cut costs, and a war with Whole FoodsInside Amazon's complex employee-review system, where workers feel left in the dark and managers expect to give 5% of reports bad reviewsAfter 28 years, 'Day 2' finally arrives at AmazonAWS, Alexa, healthcare:Inside Amazon's struggle to break into the lucrative market for SaaS business applications, including an internal pitch to buy $38 billion HubSpotInside Amazon's struggle to crack Nvidia's AI-chip dominanceAmazon's AI data center dream runs into the reality of 'zombie' facilities, higher costs, and labor shortagesAmazon is gutting its voice assistant, Alexa. Employees describe a division in crisis and huge losses on 'a wasted opportunity.'Amazon is working on a new 'Remarkable Alexa,' but internal politics and technical issues plague the projectAmazon projected huge losses from its healthcare business in 2024, but strong sales growth, internal document reveals
AWS Amazonu v 1. čtvrtletí 2026 meziročně vzrostly tržby o 28 % na 37,6 miliardy USD, nejrychleji za 15 čtvrtletí. Firma zároveň čeká ve 2. čtvrtletí tržby 194 až 199 miliard USD.
Key Takeaways Amazon's AWS revenues rose 28% in Q1 2026, its fastest growth in 15 quarters, driven by AI demand.AMZN posted record Prime Day sales and guided Q2 net sales to $194-$199B with up to 19% growth.Amazon cites AI, advertising, grocery and newer businesses as growth drivers despite higher AI spending. Amazon (AMZN - Free Report) appears overvalued at a forward 12-month price/earnings ratio of 25.98X, higher than the Zacks Internet – Commerce industry's 21.95X. Amazon has a Value Score of D.
Yet a premium multiple does not tell the whole story on its own. Three developing catalysts, spanning cloud demand, consumer resilience and a broadening mix of revenue streams, suggest Amazon's near-term setup still favors buyers willing to look past the headline ratio, even as elevated infrastructure spending and fresh regulatory noise keep the stock's path from being entirely smooth in the months ahead.
AMZN’s P/E Ratio Depicts Stretched Valuation
Image Source: Zacks Investment Research
AWS Reacceleration Anchors the Bull CaseAmazon's cloud engine is firing again. AWS revenues grew 28% year over year in the first quarter of 2026 to $37.6 billion, its fastest growth pace in 15 quarters, as enterprises leaned harder into generative AI workloads running on Amazon's infrastructure. Bedrock customer spend climbed 170% quarter over quarter, and Amazon's custom silicon business, spanning Trainium and Graviton chips, crossed a $20 billion annual revenue run rate while growing at triple-digit percentages, with more than $225 billion in Trainium-related revenue commitments already on the books.
Management has continued expanding AWS' AI stack through the summer, adding OpenAI's latest models and a Codex coding agent to Bedrock, launching Bedrock Managed Agents, and rolling out AgentCore tools for enterprise-grade AI agents at AWS Summits in New York and Washington. AWS also confirmed a 20% July price increase on GPU-linked EC2 Capacity Blocks, a signal that AI compute demand remains tight enough to support pricing power even as the company races to add capacity. A swelling AWS backlog, boosted further by large multi-gigawatt compute commitments from external AI partners such as OpenAI and Anthropic, underscores demand visibility well beyond the current quarter and supports the case for sustained double-digit cloud growth into 2027.
Record Prime Day and Encouraging GuidanceAmazon's June 23-26 Prime Day event generated a record $26.4 billion in U.S. online sales, roughly 9% higher than a year earlier, reinforcing the strength of its 180-million-plus Prime membership base heading into the back half of 2026. That reading follows a first-quarter beat in which net sales rose 17% to $181.5 billion, advertising revenues grew 24% to $17.2 billion, and operating income reached a record 13.1% margin.
For the second quarter, management guided net sales toward $194 billion to $199 billion, representing growth of 16% to 19%, and operating income of $20 billion to $24 billion, with guidance explicitly assuming Prime Day activity landed inside the quarter. Retail unit growth of 15%, the fastest pace since the pandemic era, and a regionalized fulfillment network that has already supported more than a billion same-day or overnight deliveries this year, point to an e-commerce engine that keeps gaining efficiency alongside scale.
The Zacks Consensus Estimate for AMZN's 2026 earnings is pegged at $8.86 per share, indicating a 23.57% increase from the figure reported in the year-ago quarter.
AMZN’s Diversified Growth Engines Widen the MoatBeyond cloud and retail, Amazon's advertising business has grown into a roughly $70 billion trailing 12-month revenue stream, while the grocery business has become one of the largest food retailers in the country, with more than $150 billion of 2025 gross sales. Newer bets are also maturing: Amazon LEO's commercial satellite service is on track for a third-quarter launch, and Amazon Quick, an AI work assistant unveiled this summer with a new desktop app, is expanding across enterprise integrations alongside agentic hiring and supply-chain tools introduced at recent AWS events.
Elevated capital expenditures, guided toward roughly $200 billion for 2026, have compressed trailing free cash flow and drawn investor scrutiny, and a pending FTC inquiry into advertising disclosures adds a layer of regulatory overhang worth monitoring. Even so, management frames the AI infrastructure buildout as demand-backed rather than speculative, pointing to signed compute commitments as evidence that today's spending is underwriting tomorrow's revenues rather than sitting idle.
Taken together, a reaccelerating cloud franchise, a resilient consumer signal from Prime Day, and expanding, less cyclical revenue streams give investors reason to look past the premium multiple, provided capital spending discipline holds, and overall cloud growth continues to comfortably outrun the rising cost of building it all out over the coming quarters.
Share Price Movement and the Cloud Competitive LandscapeAmazon shares have jumped 5.2% in the past six-month period against the industry and the Zacks Retail-Wholesale sector's decline of 2.8% and 4.4%, respectively. AMZN shares have been notably volatile through 2026, retreating sharply from a 52-week high near $278 in late May to trade closer to the mid-$240s by mid-July, even after a record Prime Day and a well-received first-quarter earnings report, as investors continue to digest roughly $200 billion in planned annual capital spending on AI infrastructure.
AMZN’s 6-Month Price Performance
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AWS still leads global cloud infrastructure, but Microsoft's (MSFT - Free Report) Azure remains its closest rival, layering OpenAI's models and Copilot across its enterprise software stack to defend its share. Alphabet (GOOGL - Free Report) -owned Google Cloud has kept gaining ground through Gemini-linked AI tooling and custom TPU chips, while Oracle (ORCL - Free Report) has emerged as a faster-growing, AI-training-focused challenger through large data-center contracts. Microsoft and Google both continue investing heavily in proprietary silicon, much like Amazon, and Oracle's expanding cloud infrastructure backlog shows how contested the AI compute race between Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Oracle has become heading into the second half of 2026.
Bottom LineAmazon's blend of reaccelerating cloud growth, a record Prime Day, and expanding advertising and grocery revenues makes a reasonable case for near-term buyers, even at a premium multiple. Heavy AI capital spending and regulatory scrutiny remain watchpoints, but execution across AWS, retail and newer bets keeps the growth story intact. Amazon currently carries a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy). You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.
Amazon Leo uzavřel dohodu s Herotel o spuštění satelitní širokopásmové služby pro venkovské oblasti Jižní Afriky. Komerční start pro domácnosti je plánován na rok 2027.
Amazon Leo is displayed during the Delivering the Future EMEA 2026 event at Amazon's LCY3 fulfilment centre in Dartford, Britain, June 4, 2026. REUTERS/Toby Shepheard/File Photo Purchase Licensing Rights, opens new tab
JOHANNESBURG, July 15 (Reuters) - Amazon's (AMZN.O), opens new tab low-earth orbit satellite internet venture Amazon Leo has signed an agreement with South Africa's Herotel to launch a new broadband service aimed at connecting underserved rural communities, it said on Wednesday.
Under the agreement, Herotel, South Africa's largest fixed internet service provider, will use Amazon Leo's satellite technology to offer a new service called evry, which is expected to launch commercially in 2027 for residential customers.
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The deal comes as satellite internet providers race to expand in Africa. SpaceX's Starlink is also seeking to enter the South African market, but is awaiting proposed changes to licensing rules that could allow foreign satellite operators to meet local ownership and empowerment requirements through alternatives to equity stakes.
Amazon Leo and Herotel said their partnership would help address a longstanding connectivity gap in South Africa, where millions of people living on farms, in small towns and rural communities remain beyond the reach of reliable internet services because conventional fibre and wireless networks are often uneconomical to deploy.
Financial details of the agreement were not disclosed.
"This collaboration is about breaking down barriers and unlocking opportunity for millions of people who don't yet have reliable access for work, education, or the services they depend on," David Zapolsky, Amazon's chief global affairs and legal officer, said in a statement.
Herotel, owned by Maziv, serves more than 350,000 customers across over 550 towns through fibre and fixed wireless networks and operates 120 offices nationwide. The company said that footprint would allow it to provide installation, customer service and field operations for the satellite service from launch.
Earlier this year, Amazon Leo signed an agreement with Vodafone (VOD.L), opens new tab to link Vodafone's network to base stations in hard-to-reach locations in Africa, through its South Africa subsidiary Vodacom (VODJ.J), opens new tab.
Reporting by Nqobile Dludla; Editing by Sanjeev Miglani
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab
Nqobile is a Johannesburg-based reporter covering the South African retail, telecom and tech sectors. She has been a journalists for about 10 years. She joined Reuters in 2015 and has covered a variety of beats ranging from pharma, health to property and banking.
Andy Jassy uvedl, že prodej AI čipů by se pro Amazon mohl stát byznysem za 50 miliard USD ročně. Zájem o čipy Trainium je podle něj tak silný, že firma může v budoucnu prodávat i celé racky třetím stranám.
Amazon (AMZN +3.44%) is a company that's done a terrific job of expanding its business over the years. Not only is it an e-commerce giant, but many companies rely on its cloud business, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and that has become a major source of profit for the entire company. Amazon has also gotten involved in robotaxis, grocery stores, and healthcare.
One of its most promising new opportunities, however, could involve selling artificial intelligence (AI) chips.
Image source: Getty Images.
Why selling chips could be a huge part of Amazon's business in the future Amazon's top AI chip, Trainium, was built with a heavy focus on efficiency and scale. It's effectively built by a company that needs to scale AI efficiently, making it ideal for tech companies looking to reduce costs and improve the profitability of their AI ventures.
CEO Andy Jassy stated in the company's letter to shareholders that "there's so much demand for our chips that it's quite possible we'll sell racks of them to third parties in the future." Jassy estimates that the annual run rate for a theoretical chip business could be around $50 billion. That total includes the revenue that the stand-alone business would generate from AWS, but it's nonetheless a positive sign of the type of growth that Amazon is seeing from this area of its operations.
Last year, Amazon reported $717 billion in revenue. If the company generated an extra $50 billion in cash, that would represent growth of 7%. But with a large chunk of that likely related to AWS, the true growth rate would likely be far more modest. However, if the company prioritized that area of its operations, it could become a major growth catalyst in the future.
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Amazon's stock looks undervalued It's a bit surprising that Amazon's stock isn't doing much better given the opportunities in AI. In just the past 12 months, it's risen by around 10% -- far below the S&P 500's 20% gain over that stretch. It's lagged the market, despite the business continuing to grow and expand.
For investors, now may be an ideal time to buy the stock, as it's trading at a price-to-earnings multiple of around 30, which is extremely low when compared to the average stock in the Technology Select Sector SDPR ETF, which trades at a multiple of 38.
Amazon is a beast in the tech sector, and it can be a fantastic stock to just buy and hold for the long term, as it continually reminds investors that it isn't running out of growth opportunities anytime soon.
Amazon oznámil, že v příštích letech investuje nejméně 10 miliard EUR do modernizace evropské sítě fulfillment center pomocí robotů. To může urychlit automatizační závod a podpořit i Symbotic.
Amazon (AMZN +0.18%) recently announced that it would spend at least €10 billion ($11.4 billion) to modernize its European fulfillment network with robots over the next few years. These robots include Proteus, its fully autonomous warehouse robot; STARK, which picks up heavy bins from conveyor belts and stacks them into carts; and Vulcan, its first tactile-sensing robot that can handle a wide variety of packaging shapes and materials with extreme precision.
Will Amazon's robotics expansion create headwinds for Symbotic (SYM +2.90%), or could it accelerate the automation arms race and drive its stock even higher?
Image source: Getty Images.
What does Symbotic do? Symbotic develops fully autonomous warehouse robots that process pallets and cases. It claims a $50 million investment in just one of its modules (which includes its robots and software) can generate $250 million in savings over 25 years.
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Walmart (WMT 0.94%) is Symbotic's largest customer and one of its top investors. Symbotic generated 85% of its revenue from Walmart in fiscal 2025 (which ended last September), and it holds a contract to automate all of its U.S. regional distribution centers by 2034. Symbotic also acquired Walmart's own robotics division in early 2025, and the two companies are co-developing automated micro-fulfillment systems for individual stores.
Symbotic's other smaller customers include Target, Albertsons, C&S Wholesale, and GreenBox -- a warehouse-as-a-service joint venture it formed with its other major investor, SoftBank.
Why Amazon's move could be great news for Symbotic Amazon's new warehouse robots might initially seem like a threat to Symbotic, since the e-commerce giant could eventually sell its robots to third-party customers to offset its own spending. However, most of Symbotic's revenue still comes from Amazon's top competitor, Walmart, which will likely ramp up its own robotics spending in response to Amazon's accelerated investments.
That automation "arms race" could also drive other retail giants to sign more deals with Symbotic and its industry peers. According to Fortune Business Insights, the warehouse automation market could expand at a 16.1% CAGR from 2026 to 2034 as more of those tailwinds kick in.
From fiscal 2025 to fiscal 2028, analysts expect Symbotic's revenue and adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) to grow at CAGRs of 26% and 73%, respectively.
With an enterprise value of $3.2 billion, it still looks undervalued at one times this year's sales and 10 times its adjusted EBITDA. Therefore, this underappreciated robotics stock could still be a great long-term play on the booming warehouse automation market.
Leo Sun has positions in Amazon. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Amazon, Symbotic, Target, and Walmart. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
Jefferies vidí Amazon před výsledky za 2. čtvrtletí dobře pozicovaný díky silnému Prime Day a zrychlujícímu růstu AWS. Očekává růst tržeb AWS kolem 32 %.
Amazon.com Inc (NASDAQ:AMZN) is well-positioned heading into its second-quarter earnings report, according to Jefferies, which reiterated the e-commerce and cloud computing giant as a top pick, citing resilient consumer spending during Prime Day, accelerating Amazon Web Services (AWS) growth and what it views as a discounted valuation.
Jefferies wrote that its proprietary survey of 685 consumers indicated that Prime members continued to increase spending despite inflationary pressures. Among shoppers who participated in Prime Day this year and last year, 54% reported spending more than 10% more year over year, while Amazon remained the preferred shopping destination for many consumers.
Jefferies wrote that its survey indicated Prime members increased their spending during this year's Prime Day, with 54% of returning participants reporting they spent more than 10% more than a year earlier. The analysts also highlighted that higher prices have not discouraged shoppers, noting that 25% of respondents said they use Amazon more to seek value amid inflation.
Beyond retail, Jefferies highlighted AWS as a key driver heading into the quarter. The firm expects AWS backlog growth to continue accelerating from the 93% year-over-year increase reported in the first quarter and approach $500 billion, supporting further revenue growth.
Jefferies expects AWS revenue growth of about 32% in the second quarter, while noting investor expectations are for growth of more than 33%, compared with 28% growth in the first quarter.
The analysts also highlighted several indicators supporting AWS demand, including Anthropic's expanded long-term cloud commitment, recent EC2 price increases and growing demand for AI inferencing workloads.
On valuation, Jefferies wrote that Amazon trades at approximately 12 times next-12-month enterprise value to EBITDA, below Alphabet at roughly 17 times and Walmart at about 19 times, as well as below Amazon's own 10-year average multiple.
Shares traded hands at $247 on Tuesday afternoon, up about 7% so far this year.
Jefferies highlighted that Amazon shares have fallen about 7% since first quarter results, which it views as creating a more attractive entry point. The analysts maintained that improving AWS fundamentals and resilient retail performance support a favorable risk-reward profile.
Looking ahead to the earnings release, Jefferies noted that investors will be watching capital expenditure guidance and free cash flow, signs of continued AWS demand, and the impact of Prime Day shifting into the second quarter this year, which could create more challenging retail comparisons in the third quarter.
Amazon plánuje v roce 2026 kapitálové výdaje kolem 200 miliard USD, hlavně do AI infrastruktury a AWS. Jde o dosud bezprecedentní sázku na dlouhodobý růst.
Amazon’s chief executive put a number on the AI arms race, and it reframes the entire investment thesis for long-term holders.
The Number $200 billion.
That’s what Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN | AMZN Price Prediction) plans to spend on capital expenditures across the company in 2026, aimed primarily at AI infrastructure, custom chips, robotics, and low-earth-orbit satellite buildout. CEO Andy Jassy disclosed the figure on the Q4 2025 earnings call on February 5, 2026, telling investors: “We expect to invest about $200 billion in capital expenditures across Amazon.com, Inc., but predominantly in AWS, because we have very high demand.” This figure is forward capital expenditure guidance for 2026.
What It Means The scale of this outlay is without recent precedent inside Amazon itself. Full-year 2025 capex already reached $131.8 billion, up from $83.0 billion in 2024 and $16.9 billion in 2019. The 2026 plan pushes that trajectory higher, funding the physical layer of a business that is monetizing capacity as fast as it can install it.
The demand signal is real. AWS revenue reached $37.59 billion in Q1 2026, up 28% YoY, its fastest growth in 15 quarters, at a 37.7% operating margin. Amazon’s custom chip business, spanning Graviton, Trainium, and Nitro, is now running at a $20 billion-plus annualized run rate with triple-digit YoY growth. Committed customer demand includes roughly 2 GW of Trainium capacity for OpenAI starting 2027, up to 5 GW of Trainium chips for Anthropic, and 1 million-plus NVIDIA GPUs to be deployed starting 2026.
Market Reaction Shares closed at $197.75 on February 5, 2026, the day the $200 billion figure was announced. By the April 29, 2026 Q1 filing, the stock was at $259.67. As of July 1, 2026, the price was $241.70, with a year-to-date gain of 4.71% and a one-year gain of 9.63%. The one-month change stands at -7.49%, reflecting recent hyperscaler capex debate, and shares traded at $244.11 on July 2, 2026.
Bull Case The case rests on unit economics that are already working at scale. Q1 2026 EPS came in at $2.78 versus a $1.73 estimate, a 60.69% beat and the fifth consecutive EPS beat. Revenue was $181.52 billion, up 16.61% YoY, with operating income of $23.85 billion, up 29.6% YoY. Advertising is running at a $70 billion-plus trailing 12-month rate, growing 24% YoY.
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Custom silicon is the lever that turns capex into durable margin. Trainium 2 delivers 30-40% better price performance than comparable GPUs, and Trainium 3 offers up to 40% better price performance than Trainium 2, with nearly all supply expected to be committed by mid-2026. Graviton is used by over 90% of AWS’s top 1,000 customers. CFO Brian Olsavsky framed the operating leverage bluntly: “When you are growing 24% year over year with an annualized revenue run rate of $142 billion, you are growing a lot. And what we are continuing to see is as fast as we install this capacity, this AI capacity, we are monetizing it.”
The balance sheet can carry the load. Operating cash flow reached $139.5 billion in 2025, up 20.4% YoY, and net income hit $77.7 billion. Analyst sentiment is heavily positive, with 15 Strong Buy and 47 Buy ratings versus 4 Hold and zero Sell ratings, and a consensus target of $312.99.
Bottom Line For long-term holders, the $200 billion figure is the price of admission to a business Amazon believes will reshape its economic profile. Free cash flow will be compressed near-term, with TTM FCF at $1.2 billion and long-term debt at $119.1 billion, and management has offered no explicit ROI timeline.
The forward catalyst is management’s own guide: Q2 2026 net sales of $194.0 billion to $199.0 billion (16% to 19% YoY growth) and operating income of $20.0 billion to $24.0 billion. If AWS growth holds near the 28% rate and chip revenue keeps compounding, the $200 billion becomes an investment in scarce infrastructure that competitors cannot replicate quickly. Jassy’s own framing sets the bar: “anticipate strong long-term return on invested capital.” The number is the thesis.
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