Amazon’s AI Business Helps It Top $3 Trillion Market Cap

Amazon joined several of its fellow tech giants in the $3 trillion club, Reuters reported Monday (Aug. 3).

The company’s market value exceeded that figure for the first time Monday after Amazon reported earnings Thursday (July 30) that signaled that artificial intelligence continues to fuel demand for its cloud-computing offerings, the report said.

Amazon and Microsoft are the only two of the Magnificent Seven companies that have reported earnings so far this quarter and gotten a positive reception from investors, according to the report.

Google parent Alphabet, Meta and Tesla all saw their shares fall after reporting heavy AI spending.

Apple and Nvidia make up the remainder of the Magnificent Seven. Apple reported earnings Thursday, and shares were down on weak revenue guidance. Nvidia will report earnings Aug. 26.

Amazon and other tech giants have invested billions of dollars in expanding their AI infrastructure. Amazon is investing in Anthropic and last week completed a $50 billion investment in OpenAI.

Other companies whose market value has reached $3 trillion include Alphabet, Apple, Microsoft and Nvidia, the report said. As of Monday morning, Nvidia is the world’s largest company, with a market capitalization of nearly $5 trillion, a figure Apple also reached last week.

Meanwhile, PYMNTS reported Thursday that “Amazon appears to be abandoning the most expensive and least defensible layer of the AI stack in order to strengthen the businesses where it already enjoys structural advantages: cloud computing, retail operations, advertising and logistics.”

Its goal seems to be winning the AI economy, and the move shows capital discipline.

It also increases the stakes in Amazon’s competition with Walmart, as the latter company applies AI to product search, supply chains, employee productivity and store operations without making a major play to become a frontier-model leader. The contrast points to the next phase of retail AI competition.

“Amazon and Walmart are unlikely to win based on which company trains the most impressive general-purpose model,” the report said. “They will win based on which company can connect increasingly available intelligence to proprietary commercial systems.”