New York, Feb 18, 2026, 17:17 EST — After-hours
Amazon.com shares rose 1.8% in after-hours trading on Wednesday, edging up to $204.79 as the broader tech tape firmed after a bout of nerves around artificial intelligence spending.
The gain tracked a late-day lift in megacaps after Nvidia rose on a multi-year deal to sell millions of AI chips to Meta Platforms, while traders parsed fresh Federal Reserve minutes for clues on rate policy. “Weakness in tech was bound to bring in the marginal buyer,” said Ross Mayfield, an investment strategy analyst at Baird. (Reuters)
A separate thread landed just as investors were trying to decide whether the “AI trade” is back on its feet: Berkshire Hathaway’s quarterly Form 13F disclosure showed it held 2.276 million Amazon shares at the end of 2025, down from a total 10.0 million shares reported for the prior quarter. (A Form 13F is a quarterly snapshot of U.S.-listed equity holdings from large money managers; it is backward-looking.) (SEC)
Amazon also posted a small, routine insider update. Director Keith B. Alexander reported selling 900 shares at $203.88 apiece in a Feb. 12 transaction under a Rule 10b5-1 trading plan, a Form 4 filing showed. (SEC)
The stock remains sensitive to questions Amazon raised for itself earlier this month. In its Feb. 5 results release, Amazon said AWS fourth-quarter sales rose 24% to $35.6 billion, and CEO Andy Jassy said “we expect to invest about $200 billion in capital expenditures across Amazon in 2026,” a spending plan that has kept cash-flow math front and center. Amazon also guided first-quarter net sales of $173.5 billion to $178.5 billion. (SEC)
Investors have not had to look far for pushback on the scale of that spending. “While the rising capital intensity is not a surprise directionally, the magnitude of the spend is materially greater than consensus expected,” MoffettNathanson analysts said earlier this month, after Amazon outlined its 2026 outlay. (Capital expenditures, or capex, are big-ticket investments such as data centers, servers and chips.) (Reuters)
The financing angle is getting more attention again. UBS lifted its 2026 forecast for U.S. tech investment grade bond sales, pointing to rising capex among megacaps including Amazon and Alphabet, and wrote that “Alphabet’s recent CHF and GBP bond deals imply that U.S. tech companies will continue to look globally to fund capex.” (Reuters)
For Amazon, the near-term debate is simple and messy: can AWS and advertising growth absorb the surge in spending before investors decide the bill is too large. Microsoft and Alphabet are the closest reference points in cloud, but traders are treating each set of capex plans as its own case.
The downside case is familiar. If AI infrastructure takes longer to translate into revenue, or if competition forces pricing pressure in cloud, higher spending can squeeze free cash flow and cap valuation support — especially if rate-cut hopes slip and bond yields creep up again.
Next up, markets will look to the Federal Reserve’s next policy meeting on March 17–18 for a clearer read on rates, a backdrop that has been driving day-to-day risk appetite in megacap tech. (Federalreserve)
