Amazon has crossed a line only a handful of companies in history have ever reached. On Monday its market value topped three trillion dollars for the first time, sending the shares to a fresh all-time high, closing up 4% in the stock's best day since early May and making it just the fifth company ever to get there, alongside Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft and Alphabet. It first passed the one-trillion mark back in 2018, a reminder of how far and how fast the goalposts have moved.
What pushed it over the line
The milestone landed just days after Amazon's quarterly report, which beat expectations across the board. The company posted adjusted earnings of $1.97 a share against the $1.82 analysts expected, on revenue of $200.61 billion that topped the $196.47 billion the market had forecast. The standout was its cloud-computing arm, Amazon Web Services, where a surge in growth pushed sales to $42.2 billion, past the roughly $40.5 billion analysts had pencilled in, driven by demand for the computing power behind artificial intelligence. Amazon is not alone in that boom: rivals saw the same pull, with Microsoft's Azure cloud growing 43% and Google Cloud up 82% over their own recent quarters.
The bill keeps climbing
The catch sits in what all this growth costs. Chief executive Andy Jassy told investors Amazon now expects to spend $220 billion this year on building out capacity, up from the $200 billion it flagged in February, as the price of memory chips tied to the AI build-out keeps rising. Even that, he warned, will not be enough. “We will still not have enough capacity to meet all the demand we have in 2026,” Jassy said, adding that the same is likely to hold in 2027 and that demand already booked for 2028 is “striking.”
For a company that has climbed from one trillion dollars to three since 2018, the message is that the spending race is far from over, and that the next leg will be measured in data centres as much as in dollars.
