AMZN
Another day, another Amazon upgrade-adjacent glow-up
Bank of America Securities’ Justin Post is still in Amazon bull mode. He held the Buy rating and lifted his price target to $298 from $275, saying cloud and retail are both lining up to beat expectations.
AWS is doing the heavy lifting
Post thinks Amazon Web Services could add about $2 billion in quarter-over-quarter revenue, which is a lot more pep than the roughly $1 billion lift other analysts are looking for. He’s also modeling 28% AWS growth, helped by an estimated $1.3 billion quarterly contribution from Anthropic-related revenue. Basically: the cloud bucket may be getting bigger, faster, and fancier.
Retail isn't exactly napping either
On the consumer side, BofA card data suggests online spending accelerated by 3 percentage points quarter over quarter. Post says that could help North American retail revenue beat Street estimates by 1% to 2%, with faster delivery, grocery traction, and better inventory placement doing the boring-but-important work that actually moves sales.
The catch: AI isn’t free
Post did flag a few margin headaches — lower-margin AI revenue, higher energy costs, and a capital spending bill that could stay above $200 billion in 2026. But he still sounds pretty comfortable with the trade-off, especially since CEO Andy Jassy has said Amazon expects to monetize a lot of those AI investments within 6 to 24 months.
Big picture: Amazon’s still being treated like a two-engine plane — AWS plus retail — and Wall Street keeps betting the thing can fly higher even with the fuel bill getting uglier.