The stock gained about 5% to trade near $285 in New York, valuing the ecommerce and cloud-computing group at roughly $3.08 trillion. The advance extended Amazon’s gain for 2026 to more than 23% and placed it among a small group of technology companies to have breached the threshold.
Investor enthusiasm intensified after Amazon reported its strongest growth in cloud sales in more than four years. Revenue at Amazon Web Services rose 37% from a year earlier to $42.2 billion during the second quarter, exceeding market expectations and marking the division’s fastest expansion in 18 quarters.
The performance eased concerns that Amazon was losing ground to Microsoft and Alphabet in the race to supply computing capacity for generative AI systems. AWS remains Amazon’s largest source of operating profit and is increasingly central to its valuation as companies seek access to advanced processors, foundation models and data-centre infrastructure.
Amazon shares had already jumped nearly 14% on Friday after the earnings release. The two-session rally added hundreds of billions of dollars to the company’s value and carried the stock beyond the level needed to enter the $3 trillion club.
Amazon became the fifth company to achieve the milestone, following Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia and Alphabet. Nvidia remained the world’s most valuable listed company, with a valuation approaching $5 trillion, supported by demand for the graphics processors used to train and operate AI models.
Amazon reached $3 trillion just over two years after first exceeding $2 trillion in June 2024. The speed of the increase reflects the market’s willingness to reward companies demonstrating strong returns from AI investment, even as the cost of building data centres and securing power supplies rises sharply.
Chief executive Andy Jassy said Amazon’s AI and semiconductor businesses had each exceeded annualised revenue run rates of $25 billion. The company’s custom Trainium chips are gaining customers seeking alternatives to Nvidia’s products, while its Graviton processors are widely used for general cloud-computing workloads.
AWS has also strengthened ties with model developers including Anthropic and OpenAI. Multi-year infrastructure agreements have given Amazon greater exposure to the computing requirements of large AI laboratories, which need vast clusters of specialised chips to train increasingly complex models.
The group raised its projected capital spending for 2026 to $220 billion, up from an earlier estimate of about $200 billion. Much of the additional expenditure will fund servers, processors, networking equipment, data centres and power infrastructure required for AI and cloud services.
The scale of that programme remains a source of risk. Amazon reported a trailing 12-month free cash outflow of $7.6 billion, compared with an inflow of $18.2 billion a year earlier. Purchases of property and equipment increased by $66.1 billion, largely because of AI investment.
Executives have argued that the spending is necessary because demand continues to exceed available capacity. Amazon expects constraints in parts of its cloud network to persist, with customer commitments extending into 2028.
Second-quarter group sales increased 20% to $200.6 billion, while operating income rose 43% to $27.5 billion. AWS generated operating profit of $16.6 billion, up from $10.2 billion a year earlier, accounting for about 60% of Amazon’s total.
Net income reached $62.6 billion, although the figure included a substantial non-operating gain linked to Amazon’s investment in Anthropic. The rise highlighted both the commercial value and financial volatility attached to the company’s AI partnerships.
Amazon’s other businesses also contributed to the improved outlook. Advertising revenue climbed 26% to $19.8 billion as the company placed more promotional content across its shopping platform, streaming services and connected television products.
North American sales rose 16% to $116.2 billion, while international revenue advanced 15% to $42.2 billion. Faster delivery times and increased demand for groceries and everyday goods helped strengthen the retail operation, which has traditionally produced narrower margins than AWS.
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