NEW YORK (AP) — Amazon joined the exclusive $2 trillion club on Wednesday after Wall Street investors pushed the e-commerce giant’s shares past the $2 trillion threshold.
Amazon.com Inc. shares closed up nearly 4 percent, giving the Seattle-based company a market capitalization of $2.1 trillion. The company’s shares have risen 52 percent in the past 12 months, in part due to the company’s enthusiasm for investing in artificial intelligence.
Amazon joins Google parent Alphabet, software giant Microsoft, iPhone maker Apple and chipmaker Nvidia as companies valued at more than $2 trillion.
Last week, Nvidia Reaching $3 trillion And for a time it became the most valuable company on Wall Street. Nvidia chips It is used to power many AI applications, and as a result its valuation has skyrocketed.
Amazon has been investing heavily in AI amid growing global interest in the technology. Most of the focus has been on AI models and A chatbot called Q Amazon provides it to companies that use its products Cloud Computing Unit AWS.
“The big drivers of the valuation growth are cloud and AI,” said Dan Ives, a technology analyst at Wedbush. “Amazon is going to be a major player in the AI revolution.”
Amazon Chief Executive Andy Jassy said in April that AI capabilities would help re-accelerate growth at AWS, putting the company on pace to reach $100 billion in annual sales, after the division’s growth slowed last year as companies cut costs amid high inflation.
Amazon is Invested $4 billion It has commissioned the San Francisco-based AI company Anthropic to develop so-called foundational models that will serve as the foundation for its generative AI systems, and Amazon also manufactures and designs its own AI chips.
Outside of its cloud business, Amazon has made significant cost cuts since the second half of 2022, laying off more than 27,000 employees across multiple divisions. Reported Revenues and Profits “The company delivered strong first quarter results driven by growth from AWS, its core retail business and advertising, all of which is boosting investor sentiment,” said Neil Saunders, managing director at GlobalData Retail.
“There are certainly drawbacks, but they are mostly external, like threats from the FTC,” Sanders said. Federal government antitrust lawsuit against the company.
However, he said, “investors believe these dark clouds are still far away and are not lowering current valuations.”
