Amazon has joined the $3 trillion club. The company’s market value crossed the mark for the first time on Monday, making it the fifth listed company to get there, after a rally driven almost entirely by artificial intelligence.
The shares hit a record $287.16 and rose around 4% on the day, their best session since early May and up more than 23% this year. It has taken Amazon a little over two years to add its third trillion, having reached $2tn in June 2024.
The catalyst was cloud. Amazon’s recent quarter, in which AWS growth soothed fears about its AI spending, drove the stock up and kept it climbing into this week.
AWS is now running at an annualised $169bn, after growing 37% in the quarter, its fastest pace in more than four years. Group revenue topped $200bn for the first time, and the demand behind it is generative-AI training and deployment.
The executive in charge is not playing it down. Matt Garman, who runs AWS, told Bloomberg that the potential AI business is ‘just massive’, the kind of line that reads as confidence when the capacity to back it is being poured in real time.
That building is expensive. Chief executive Andy Jassy has lifted Amazon’s planned capital spending to about $220bn for the year, up from an earlier $200bn, with almost all of the increase going into AI data centres and chips.
The chips are increasingly Amazon’s own. Its custom Trainium and Graviton processors now sit on a combined run rate above $25bn, and Jassy has said the chip business could be worth $50bn, a hedge against leaning on Nvidia.
The spending is part of a much larger wave. Big Tech is now carrying nearly $2.4 trillion in commitments tied to AI, and Amazon’s raised budget is one line in a bill the whole industry is running up.
Demand has been outrunning supply. Amazon has said its computing capacity was not enough to serve customers even after it raised spending, an unusually blunt admission that the constraint is physical rather than commercial.
The result also resets the cloud scoreboard. AWS had been growing more slowly than Microsoft’s Azure and Google Cloud for stretches of the AI boom, so a 37% quarter is Amazon’s answer that it has not surrendered the lead it built.
Profitability is the quieter part of the story. AWS margins widened even as spending climbed, a sign the AI workloads are landing on infrastructure Amazon can run at scale rather than bleeding cash.
Wall Street has cheered rather than flinched. Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan both raised their price targets, reading the AWS acceleration as evidence that the AI spending is turning into revenue rather than staying a cost.
That is the fear the quarter answered. For much of the year, investors worried that the hyperscalers were spending on AI faster than it could pay back, and AWS’s reacceleration is the clearest counter yet.
Amazon is spending on people as well as silicon. It has put $1bn into forward-deployed engineers to embed AWS staff inside enterprise customers, a bet that winning AI workloads is as much about hand-holding as horsepower.
The company keeps elevated company. The $3tn club now holds Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Nvidia, and Amazon, with Nvidia out in front near $5tn, a roster that reads as a list of who is selling the AI boom its infrastructure.
The risk sits on the far side of the same trade. If AI demand cools or the payback slows, the capital already committed becomes a weight rather than a lever, which is why every quarter of AWS growth now carries outsized weight.
The milestone is a number, and numbers can retrace. But for a company that spent the year defending its AI bill, crossing $3tn on the strength of that same spending is the market’s way of saying it now believes the story.
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