NEW YORK, April 23, 2026, 12:12 EDT
Amazon shares touched a fresh intraday high on Thursday, extending a sharp April rally as investors bet the company’s deeper push into artificial intelligence and its expanded tie-up with Anthropic will show up more clearly in quarterly results next week. The stock traded as high as $258.79 in New York.
The timing matters. Amazon will report first-quarter results on April 29, the same day as Alphabet, Microsoft and Meta, as investors press the biggest cloud groups to show that rising data-center spending is producing real growth rather than just bigger bills. Reuters reported last week that the four are expected to spend more than $600 billion this year on data centers.
By late morning, Amazon was up about 0.5% at $256.62 after closing at a record $255.36 on Wednesday, according to market data and historical price data. The move pushed the shares above the previous 52-week high of $258.60.
The latest spark came from Monday’s Anthropic deal. Amazon said it would invest $5 billion immediately and up to $25 billion overall in the startup, while Anthropic committed to spend more than $100 billion over 10 years on Amazon’s cloud tools and custom Trainium chips. Anthropic’s use of Trainium chips “reflects the progress we’ve made together on custom silicon,” Chief Executive Andy Jassy said. Reuters
That deal added to a case already taking shape around Amazon Web Services, or AWS, the company’s cloud arm. Earlier this month, Jassy said AWS’s AI services were generating more than $15 billion in annual revenue at the current pace and that Amazon’s custom chip business was running above $20 billion; he said the company was not “investing … on a hunch.” Brian Mulberry, chief market strategist at Zacks Investment Management, said the disclosure showed AWS was turning AI demand into real, high-growth revenue. Reuters
Analysts have been moving with it. KeyBanc’s Justin Patterson lifted his target price to $325 from $285 this week, saying AWS was becoming a roughly 30% grower on capacity ramps and client wins. Barron’s separately reported that Truist analyst Youssef Squali raised his target to $285 from $280 ahead of earnings, while MarketBeat data show Wall Street’s average target near $289.
The peer backdrop is not forgiving. In February, Amazon said AWS revenue rose 24% in the December quarter to $35.6 billion, compared with 48% growth at Google Cloud and 39% at Microsoft Azure, though Jassy argued those rivals were growing from a much smaller base.
Still, the run has been steep. MarketBeat said Amazon’s relative strength index, a momentum gauge traders use to judge whether a stock has moved too far, too fast, had reached its most overbought level in more than three years after the shares jumped nearly 30% in a few weeks.
Other commentary is more cautious. A Seeking Alpha note published on Wednesday said Amazon, trading at about 32 times expected earnings, left little room for disappointment if free cash flow — cash left after operating and investment spending — or margins wobble again as the company pours money into AI and its Leo satellite internet business.
That risk is not theoretical. Amazon’s February forecast for $200 billion in capital spending sent the stock sharply lower, and D.A. Davidson analyst Gil Luria said then that Amazon “has to invest at these levels just to stay in the race.” With Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft and Meta all due to report on April 29, the next earnings round may quickly show whether revenue is starting to catch up with the bill. Reuters
