NEW YORK, Feb 17, 2026, 05:13 EST — Premarket
Amazon.com slipped 0.4% to $198.79 in Tuesday’s premarket action, leaving shares stuck close to recent lows as the session approached.
After the Presidents Day break closed markets on Monday, U.S. stocks are gearing up to reopen. Traders returning now find a market more reactive to major spending plans.
It’s a big deal for Amazon, swept up in the wider selloff hitting mega-cap tech stocks grappling with artificial intelligence spending. Shares are down approximately 13.85% since the start of the year—about $343 billion wiped off its market cap, pushing the company’s value to nearly $2.13 trillion, according to Reuters calculations. Investors are demanding faster payoffs from Amazon’s AI bets.
On Monday, Amazon Web Services announced several product updates. The company is making its EC2 M8azn instances generally available; these run on fifth-generation AMD EPYC chips and clock up to 5 GHz. Meanwhile, AWS expanded its “open weights” lineup on Bedrock—these are models that let developers access and tweak the parameters. New additions include DeepSeek V3.2 and Qwen3 Coder Next among others. Amazon Web Services, Inc.
AWS announced long-term support for Amazon DocumentDB 5.0, pitching the move as a route for customers to reduce how often they upgrade and pare back maintenance, since updates will now focus on core stability and security fixes only.
The immediate focus isn’t really on Amazon’s product cadence—it’s about speed. Can the company, along with its rivals, keep pushing forward on AI infrastructure without putting a squeeze on cash flow or prompting a rethink on what investors should expect?
Some onlookers say the recent drop is being driven more by anxiety than by fundamentals. “Nothing has fundamentally changed,” Futurum Chief Research Officer David Nicholson told Schwab Network, characterizing the dynamic as a standoff: Wall Street and Big Tech at odds over how fast AI bets will pay off. Benzinga
Investors aren’t mincing words on the risk. Amazon’s $200 billion capital plan landed with a jolt—MoffettNathanson analysts called out that “the magnitude of the spend is materially greater than consensus expected.” CEO Andy Jassy, for his part, rejected parallels to speedier rivals, underscoring the size of AWS instead. Reuters
Over the next few sessions, traders may shift their focus from Amazon’s own news flow to what the AI story means more broadly. Nvidia’s set to report fourth-quarter fiscal 2026 results on Feb. 25—a date that’s circled on plenty of calendars. For many investors, Nvidia’s update serves as a real-time barometer for chip supply, data-center budgets, and the pace of AI infrastructure that’s been critical for cloud expansion.
