AMZN
Not the reaction bulls wanted… or did they?
Amazon’s shares slipped even after a strong first-quarter report, but Wall Street mostly treated the dip like a flash sale. A stack of analysts came through with higher price targets, and the message was pretty consistent: the market may be nitpicking the near-term stock move, while the business is still doing very Amazon things—growing, spending, and trying to own the future.
AWS is still the main character
The loudest drumbeat in the note pile was AWS. Goldman said the cloud unit can keep cranking out roughly 30% year-over-year growth, while Scotiabank called it a $150 billion annualized run-rate business growing at its fastest pace in about four years. That’s the kind of sentence that makes cloud investors sit up straighter.
And the AI angle is getting even more baked in. Analysts pointed to Amazon’s huge backlog, the Anthropic relationship, and the company’s custom silicon push as signs that AWS isn’t just renting servers anymore—it’s trying to become the plumbing for the AI boom.
The rest of the business is pulling weight too
This wasn’t just a cloud victory lap. JPMorgan highlighted stronger retail growth, with everyday essentials making up a bigger chunk of what people are buying. Needham added that Prime Video was profitable for the first time in the quarter, which is the kind of quiet milestone that can matter a lot over time.
Why investors should care
- Higher price targets usually mean analysts think the recent stock dip is overdone.
- AWS acceleration is the real engine here, especially if AI demand keeps feeding the backlog.
- Amazon’s capex keeps climbing, but Wall Street seems more interested in the return on that spending than the bill itself.
Big picture: Amazon is once again doing the annoying-but-impressive thing where it spends like a teenager with a fresh paycheck and still manages to look like a long-term compounding machine.