Amazon's stock has come alive, setting the company up to join an exclusive club

Dow Jones03:14

MW Amazon's stock has come alive, setting the company up to join an exclusive club

By William Gavin

Amazon's stock needs to rise less than 2% for the company's market cap to top $3 trillion - something only four other companies have ever achieved

Amazon Web Services has become a major driver of Amazon.com's stock price.

Only four U.S. companies have ever been worth $3 trillion, but Amazon.com is getting closer to joining that exclusive club.

Amazon is currently worth about $2.95 trillion, putting that major market-capitalization milestone in reach. Shares were up 0.7% in recent afternoon trading Tuesday, at $274.01, and were heading toward a fourth straight record close. To reach a $3 trillion market capitalization, the stock needs to rise 1.7% to trade at $278.89, according to Dow Jones Market Data.

The four other "Magnificent Seven" stocks that have breached the $3 trillion threshold are Microsoft $(MSFT)$, Apple $(AAPL)$, Nvidia (NVDA) and Alphabet $(GOOG)$ $(GOOGL)$. The remaining members of that group of megacap tech stocks - Meta Platforms (META) and Tesla $(TSLA)$ - have market caps of $1.53 trillion and $1.47 trillion, respectively.

If Amazon reaches the $3 trillion milestone, the company would have tripled its market value in roughly six years and three months, according to Dow Jones Market Data. It became a $1 trillion company on Feb. 4, 2020, and surpassed the $2 trillion milestone less than two years ago, on June 26, 2024.

Amazon's stock has traded higher in recent weeks due to the company's advanced work - and big spending - on artificial intelligence. Last week, the company reported first-quarter earnings that showed growth across its businesses, especially within its cloud division.

Amazon Web Services grew sales by 28% from a year earlier, which the company noted was the business's fastest rate of growth in 15 quarters, while its operating margin of 37.7% was the best since the first quarter of 2025. During a call with analysts, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said AWS has a $364 billion backlog, excluding a recent $100 billion deal with the AI lab Anthropic. That's up from $244 billion as of the end of 2025.

"To put our growth in perspective, three years after AWS launched, it had a $58 million revenue run rate," Jassy said. "In the first three years of this AI wave, AWS's AI revenue run rate is over $15 billion, nearly 260 times larger."

Amazon also has more than $225 billion in revenue commitments for its Trainium chips, largely thanks to its deals with Anthropic and OpenAI, which has left its chips mostly reserved. The company said it has landed more than 2.1 million AI chips over the past 12 months, over half of which were Trainium chips.

Another class of chip, the Graviton family of central processing units, is at the heart of Amazon's recent deal with Meta that's worth tens of millions of dollars. Overall, the chip business has topped a $20 billion revenue run rate, which Amazon said reflects triple-digit year-over-year growth.

"Even as customers increase their AI spending with AWS, there is a halo effect where consumption of AWS core services also increases," William Blair's Dylan Carden said in a note to clients last week.

"This dynamic speaks to a fundamental competitive advantage for AWS," Carden added, referring to its scale and pre-existing enterprise relationships. He rates the stock at outperform.

Read more: Amazon is taking on FedEx and UPS. That may not be so simple.

While AWS is a major focus, it's not the only thing Amazon has been working on. On Monday, the company opened up its freight, distribution, fulfillment and parcel-shipping services to all businesses, rather than just its selling partners. The initiative could scale into a $25 billion business and broaden Amazon's logistics footprint, Baird analyst Colin Sebastian said in a note.

Amazon's stock has run up 18.7% in 2026, while the Roundhill Magnificent Seven exchange-traded fund MAGS has gained 1.6% and the S&P 500 index SPX has advanced 6.2%.

-William Gavin

This content was created by MarketWatch, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. MarketWatch is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.

 

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May 05, 2026 15:14 ET (19:14 GMT)

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