New York, Feb 19, 2026, 10:56 (EST) — Regular session.
- Amazon slipped roughly 0.3% in late morning trading, falling alongside the wider tech sector.
- Morgan Stanley stuck with its Overweight rating, highlighting AWS “capex yield” and the rise of AI shopping agents as key things to watch.
- Amazon’s retail boss unloaded shares through a preset trading plan, according to an SEC filing.
Amazon.com slipped early Thursday. Shares traded down 0.3% at $204.15 as of 10:40 a.m. ET, following a $204.79 close on Wednesday. Investors sifted through new insider-trading disclosures, with questions still swirling around the payoff from Big Tech’s AI outlays.
The shift is small, yet it drops right into a market debate that’s far from settled. Earlier this month, Amazon told investors to expect $200 billion in capital spending for 2026, a bump from $131 billion in 2025, as the company ramps up its artificial-intelligence infrastructure.
Tech names dragged U.S. stocks lower, nerves clearly on edge. By 9:43 a.m. ET, the Dow had dropped 0.45%, with the S&P 500 down 0.36% and the Nasdaq losing 0.58%, according to Reuters. “So on any given day, the bias switches very fast and that’s a great indicator of overall investor nervousness,” said Kim Forrest, founder and chief investment officer at Bokeh Capital. Reuters
Brian Nowak at Morgan Stanley kept his Overweight call on the stock, sticking with a $300 price target—roughly 50% above where shares are trading right now. “We remain bullish through this uncertainty,” he said, highlighting AWS demand and what he sees as the first indications that AI tools could boost both the cloud side and retail. Investing
Nowak pointed out that AWS’s backlog suggests the company could sustain growth above 30% for an extended period, though he flagged data-center capacity constraints as a real brake on how fast things can actually pick up. Looking at it through a “capex yield” approach — that’s incremental revenue versus what was spent on capital the previous year — he expects those yields to get better as AWS ramps up capacity.
He pointed to “agentic commerce”—AI agents that make purchases and handle reorders for users—as another spark for Amazon’s retail business. According to Nowak, Amazon’s Rufus shopping assistant is already boosting gross merchandise value growth for the fourth quarter of 2025. GMV refers to the overall dollar value of goods sold on the platform.
Another data point on insider moves: Douglas J. Herrington, CEO of Worldwide Amazon Stores, unloaded 4,784 shares on Feb. 17. The filing pegged the weighted average sale price between roughly $196.75 and $200.08. The sales happened under a Rule 10b5-1 trading plan he set up back on Nov. 10, 2025.
Director Wendell P. Weeks turned 1,816 restricted stock units into common shares on Feb. 15, according to a separate filing.
Still, the risk hasn’t disappeared. Should AI-driven investments fail to deliver more obvious boosts to revenue and profits—or if cloud constraints persist beyond what investors are factoring in—Amazon’s stock may find itself stuck in the same choppy, uncertain territory that’s dogged other megacap tech names.
Investors now turn to the next crucial update on the AI story: Nvidia’s quarterly report lands Feb. 25 after the bell. That date has become a focal point for anyone tracking data-center demand and the wider spending backdrop, with Amazon in the mix.
