Amazon shares climbed roughly 5pc on 3 August 2026, pushing the company’s market value past $3 trillion for the first time. It is the fifth company to reach a $3 trillion valuation, following Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet and Nvidia. Amazon first passed $1 trillion in late 2018 and reached $2 trillion in June 2024, meaning it took roughly two years to add the second trillion to its valuation.
Amazon’s $3 trillion valuation driven by AWS and AI chips
The jump follows Amazon’s second-quarter results, published 30 July, which beat analyst forecasts. Net sales rose 20pc year-on-year to more than $200bn, while operating income increased 43pc to $27.5bn. Sales at AWS, Amazon’s cloud division, grew 37pc year-over-year to $42.2bn, its fastest pace in 18 quarters and a central reason the stock closed in on a $3 trillion valuation this week.
Amazon president and CEO Andy Jassy told investors “AWS is booming”, adding that its AI and chips businesses had each passed run rates of more than $25bn, growth he described as “triple-digit percentages” year-on-year. Jassy also raised the company’s 2026 capital expenditure projection to $220bn, up from the $200bn estimate given in February and reaffirmed in April.
“Even at that amount, we will still not have enough capacity to meet all the demand we have in 2026, and I believe this dynamic will also be true in 2027 too,” Jassy said on the earnings call. “In fact, the demand we already have for 2028 is striking.”
Big tech’s AI infrastructure deals
Heavy spending on data centres and AI has already reshaped Amazon’s cash position: free cash flow showed an outflow of $7.6bn over the past 12 months, compared with an inflow of $18.2bn over the same period a year earlier. The pace of that spending is part of why investors pushed the stock to a $3 trillion valuation rather than waiting for cash flow to recover first.
AWS has a 2GW deal with OpenAI for Trainium chip capacity and a separate 5GW agreement with Anthropic, alongside a $25bn direct investment in the AI lab. The cloud division also works with Nvidia rival Cerebras, supplies Uber with Graviton and Trainium chips, and is deploying tens of millions of Graviton cores for Meta‘s AI workloads.
Layoffs and EU scrutiny continue alongside the AI spending
Amazon has paired its AI investment with large job cuts. It removed about 16,000 roles in January, after cutting roughly 14,000 positions the previous October. Around 450 jobs in Ireland were affected by the reductions, even as the company’s overall valuation climbed toward the $3 trillion mark.
Separately, AWS could face a “gatekeeper” designation under EU rules, given its position as the largest cloud computing provider in Europe. Under the EU’s Digital Markets Act, that label would bring added interoperability and data-sharing obligations. Regulators have not confirmed a timeline for the decision, but the scale of AWS’s AI-driven growth is likely to keep the division under close watch as Amazon’s capital spending climbs toward $220bn for the year.