NEW YORK, February 19, 2026, 07:59 EST — Premarket
Amazon.com Inc dropped 0.2% to $204.35 before the bell Thursday, down from its $204.79 finish on Wednesday. Shares have been sticking close to that mark in early moves. (Investing)
Amazon’s role as a litmus test for investor appetite in Big Tech’s AI ambitions is hard to miss. AMZN shares added 1.8% Wednesday, pulled higher alongside Nvidia and other major players as Wall Street got a lift. “Weakness in tech was bound to bring in the marginal buyer,” said Baird strategist Ross Mayfield. (Reuters)
The mood softened before Thursday’s open. Futures on major U.S. indexes edged down as investors eyed Walmart’s earnings set to land before the bell, plus weekly jobless claims. Friday brings the personal consumption expenditures price index, the inflation barometer favored by the Fed. (Reuters)
Morgan Stanley’s Brian Nowak isn’t budging on Amazon — still his “Top Pick.” He says both AWS and Amazon’s retail side are flying a bit under the radar as winners from generative AI, the tech powering chatbots. The overweight rating stays, along with that $300 price target. AWS demand, per Nowak, looks solid but is getting capped by how fast new data centers come online. He singled out Amazon’s Rufus shopping assistant as one early win for AI in retail. “As AWS opens more data centers, this ‘yield’ should improve,” he wrote, calling “capex yield” his shorthand for the company’s return on capital spending. (Investing)
Nerves rattled the market after Amazon stock tumbled 9% on Feb 6, triggered by the company’s announcement of a $200 billion capital expenditure plan for 2026. That scale surprised MoffettNathanson, with analysts flagging the spend as “materially greater than consensus expected.” Microsoft and Alphabet didn’t escape the fallout either—both saw shares dip as their earnings highlighted swelling AI budgets. Andy Jassy, Amazon’s chief, brushed off comparisons to smaller cloud players and insisted, “AWS is a much larger business than its competitors.” (Reuters)
Amazon Stores chief Douglas Herrington sold 4,784 shares on Feb 17, according to a Wednesday filing, cashing out at prices between roughly $196.75 and $200.08. The Form 4 noted the transactions were carried out under a Rule 10b5-1 trading plan—Herrington set that up on Nov 10, 2025. (SEC)
The risk hasn’t vanished. Investors still want to see that all this spending translates into actual cash flow, rather than just a swell of new servers and rising depreciation. In its Feb 5 results, Amazon laid out plans for roughly $200 billion in capex for 2026, a jump from $131 billion in 2025. That kind of outlay, says Aptus Capital Advisors portfolio manager Dave Wagner, is exactly what the market “dislikes—the substantial amount of money that keeps getting put into capex for these growth rates.” (Reuters)
Amazon’s first-quarter numbers are due out April 30, per Yahoo Finance’s earnings calendar. Watch for any tweaks in how the company talks about AWS capacity or capital outlays—that’s likely to determine if the stock’s recent rebound sticks. (Yahoo Finance)
