Amazon joins $3 trillion club as AI-fueled cloud growth surges

Amazon’s market value topped $3 trillion for the first time as investors pushed the stock higher on confidence that AI demand will keep feeding Amazon Web Services. Shares were last up 5% at $285.01 and had gained more than 23% in 2026, turning the rally into a direct test of whether Amazon’s cloud engine can justify a valuation once reserved for the market’s rarest giants.

The numbers behind the move were strong enough to support that bet. Amazon said in its second-quarter results that net sales rose 20% from a year earlier to $200.6 billion, while operating income climbed 43% to $27.5 billion. AWS net sales increased 37%, the fastest pace in 18 quarters, and reached a $169 billion annualized revenue run rate, a level that shows how much of Amazon’s profit power still flows through the cloud business.

That cloud strength matters more than the retail headline. AWS is the company’s main profit engine, and its growth has reassured investors who were watching whether heavy AI spending would outpace demand. The business sits at the center of enterprise computing, where companies need storage, data infrastructure and compute capacity to run generative AI and machine-learning tools. Amazon’s latest results suggest those workloads are still scaling fast enough to absorb higher spending.

The company is also leaning in harder. Amazon lifted its 2026 capital expenditure plan to $220 billion, citing higher memory costs, a sign that it intends to keep building out the infrastructure needed for cloud and AI services. That spending level underscores the scale of the wager: Amazon is not only monetizing AI demand, it is also committing more cash to stay ahead of rivals fighting for the same workloads, chips and data-center capacity.

For Wall Street, the $3 trillion mark is less a symbolic finish line than a valuation check. Amazon is being priced as a company with multiple growth and margin engines, from e-commerce scale and digital advertising to logistics and AWS, rather than as a retailer with a cloud division attached. The climb from a $2 trillion market capitalization in June 2024 to $3 trillion now shows how quickly investors have re-rated the business as AI spending, cloud expansion and operating leverage converged into one of the market’s most powerful trades.