Amazon tops $3trn as AWS sales grow 36.7 per cent

Amazon’s stock market value topped $3 trillion on Monday, making it the fifth company to reach the milestone, after second-quarter results showed its cloud arm growing at its fastest rate in more than four years.

Shares in the Nasdaq constituent closed up $12.44, or 5 per cent, at $284.02 in New York on Monday night, a record high. The stock has risen 23.05 per cent since the start of the year.

Amazon follows Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia and Alphabet, which owns Google, in passing the mark. Apple is valued at $4.5 trillion and briefly topped $5 trillion last week. Nvidia, the chip maker, is at $5 trillion and Microsoft at $3.6 trillion.

The rally began last week, when the shares recorded their biggest one-day jump since April 2012 following Amazon’s second-quarter results. The company reported that Amazon Web Services grew net sales by 36.7 per cent compared with a year earlier, to $42.2 billion. Group net sales rose 20 per cent to $200.6 billion and operating income rose 43 per cent to $27.5 billion.

Amazon also raised its capital spending forecast for 2026, to about $220 billion.

Andy Jassy, chief executive, described AWS as “booming” in a statement accompanying the results.

“Our AI and chips businesses each eclipsed run rates of more than $25 billion,” Jassy said. “In stores, we again set record delivery speeds for Prime members in the first half of the year, over 40 per cent more items delivered same-day or overnight, with grocery and everyday essentials growing meaningfully faster than the rest of the business.”

Over the three trading days to Monday, the shares recorded their strongest 72-hour stretch since the three days ending 27 October 2009, when they rose 30.6 per cent.

Mark Hackett, chief market strategist at Nationwide, the US financial services group, said: “Amazon is probably the most emblematic of the economy right now. It’s a consumer story and it’s an AI story.”

Hackett said the results had shifted sentiment across the wider market. “The big scepticism coming into earnings season was if they [hyperscalers] were turning the spigot down on spending on AI. We did not get that from Amazon and Microsoft and that has unleashed a much broader all-clear for the market.”

AWS is the division behind Amazon’s UK infrastructure spending. The company said in June last year that it would invest £40 billion in the UK over three years across fulfilment centres, film production and data centres, and AWS has separately committed £8 billion to UK data centres by 2028.

Demand for AWS capacity has been driven in part by contracted work for AI developers. In November 2025, OpenAI signed a $38 billion agreement with AWS for computing capacity.

Amazon was co-founded by Jeff Bezos, who remains the largest shareholder with a stake of close to 9 per cent.