Amazon.com Inc

Evercore ISI says a sharp selloff across internet equities this year has created an attractive entry point, with major hyperscalers poised for potential free cash flow inflection points over the next 3 to 12 months. The 19 large-cap internet stocks covered by Evercore ISI have dropped by an average of 18% in 2026, severely underperforming broader market benchmarks, with the S&P 500 up 14% and the Nasdaq Composite rising 19%. Evercore ISI Senior Managing Director Mark Mahaney attributed the sector's underperformance to six primary bear market factors: stretched valuation exits after a three-year bull run, AI disruption risks that have hit names like Booking Holdings, Expedia Group, Shopify and Uber Technologies, capex intensity at major hyperscalers, inflationary headwinds from the ongoing war in Iran, investor capital reallocation ahead of an incoming generation of mega-cap internet public offerings, and the emergence of autonomous AI agents as primary consumer interfaces. Despite pervasive market skepticism that massive AI capex will cause negative free cash flow at Amazon.com, Alphabet and Meta Platforms over the next two to three years, Evercore ISI argued that Wall Street consensus is overly pessimistic, noting that upward revisions to revenue and operating income could easily offset spending increases. Mahaney wrote that positive free cash flow inflection points over the next 3 to 12 months could serve as a major catalyst to right market wrongs.

Amazon.com is reportedly considering moving roughly $8 billion of Nvidia Grace Blackwell chips into a special-purpose vehicle financed by outside investors and then leasing the hardware back, a structure that would make part of its AI buildout more asset-light as capital spending is expected to reach $220 billion this year. AWS revenue rose 37% to $42.2 billion in the second quarter, its fastest growth in more than four years, and contract backlog reached $496 billion, while CEO Andy Jassy said the company still lacks enough capacity to meet demand. Trailing-12-month free cash flow swung to negative $7.6 billion from positive $18.2 billion a year earlier as infrastructure spending accelerated. Amazon trades at 23.64 times forward earnings, and Tigress Financial recently raised its target to $385 from $315, arguing earnings from the investment cycle are approaching an inflection point where they grow faster than operating capital. The proposal also raises the question of residual chip value, since Grace Blackwell will eventually be superseded by Vera Rubin while Amazon assumes semiconductor generations remain useful for at least five years.

HSBC upgraded Synopsys to Buy from Hold on September 25 and raised its price target from $490 to $700, implying a multiple of nearly 35 times HSBC's fiscal 2027 EPS estimates. Analyst Frank Lee said the company is evolving beyond its traditional slow-growth software profile as its licensing-plus-royalty model and agentic AI tools create a new path to benefit from AI. The upgrade follows Synopsys' fiscal third-quarter results, when revenue rose 42% to $2.48 billion, including approximately $711 million from Ansys, alongside higher full-year guidance. Synopsys announced a multiyear agreement worth more than $1 billion with Amazon on September 30, combining IP licensing with production-linked royalties, though the company has said revenue synergies from Ansys will not begin until fiscal 2027. The stock trades at approximately 61 times the midpoint of management's fiscal 2027 GAAP EPS guidance, or roughly 28 times adjusted earnings, and carries about $7 billion more debt than cash, largely tied to the Ansys deal.

Matt Garman, CEO of Amazon.com Inc.'s AWS, said concerns over an AI spending bubble are overstated, telling a16z's podcast with Raghu Raghuram on Thursday that Amazon does not rely on one customer for most AWS capacity and that "we feel really good about the spend we're making now." Garman said demand is concentrated in production workloads such as computing, storage and AI inference, and that a diversified approach means not all capacity is bundled up in one customer, comparing the market to venture capital where failed startups can be offset by successful investments. His comments come as AWS highlights efforts to make AI more affordable, and as Amazon is reportedly in talks to transfer about $8 billion worth of Nvidia Corp.'s Grace Blackwell AI chips to an investor-backed special-purpose vehicle that could raise funds through debt issuance while Amazon leases the chips back. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy raised the company's 2026 capital expenditure forecast by $20 billion to $220 billion in July, citing rising memory chip prices and strong demand for AI and AWS infrastructure. Separately, billionaire investor Ray Dalio warned that rising AI-related borrowing, higher interest rates and pressure to turn paper wealth into cash could bring the AI bubble closer to bursting, calling the boom a "classic bubble" and comparing the current AI rally to the late 1920s.

Google and Constellation Energy announced a long-term clean energy collaboration that will add 890 megawatts of new nuclear capacity to the PJM grid under a 20-year power purchase agreement. The deal also includes a 15-year, 2,700 megawatt supply agreement and more than US$4.30 billion of nuclear fleet investments supported by Google Cloud's AI technology. The Google contracts follow a separate 20-year agreement with Amazon backing over US$3.00 billion of upgrades and a 190 megawatt uprate at Maryland's Calvert Cliffs plant. Together the contracts show how hyperscale customers are directly underwriting incremental nuclear capacity, life extensions and digital optimization across Constellation's fleet. Constellation Energy's narrative projects $39.9 billion revenue and $6.5 billion earnings by 2029, requiring 8.5% yearly revenue growth and a $3.0 billion earnings increase from $3.5 billion today.

Constellation Energy has landed two 20-year contracts with tech giants in about a week, with Google committing to 890 MW of new nuclear capacity on PJM days after Amazon signed a deal tied to a 190 MW expansion at Calvert Cliffs. Constellation, the largest nuclear operator in the US, runs 55 gigawatts of capacity across nuclear, gas, geothermal, hydro, wind and solar since buying Calpine earlier this year, and sells power to about 2.5 million customer accounts, including 80% of the Fortune 100. The company will invest more than $4.3 billion to upgrade 11 nuclear units across Illinois, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, with the first uprate due by 2028, while a separate 15-year agreement covers 2,700 MW from existing plants. Adjusted operating earnings rose to $2.55 a share from $1.91 a year earlier and management raised full-year adjusted guidance to $11.50 to $12.50 a share, though GAAP earnings fell to $1.42 from $2.67. The quarter's 920 MW of new agreements run 15 to 20 years with investment-grade buyers and start between 2029 and 2032, and the Crane Clean Energy Center restart now has its fuel license and a key grid-connection approval, with the company still targeting 2027.

Synopsys unveiled a major agreement with Amazon covering its intellectual property across custom silicon programs including Trainium, Graviton and Nitro, alongside a partnership with OpenAI to develop GPT-Synopsys, a specialized AI model for semiconductor design. The Amazon deal introduces a royalty-based component tied to chip production. Management also issued a stronger-than-expected outlook, projecting fiscal 2027 revenue of $11.10–$11.20 billion, above the roughly $10.81 billion analysts had expected, and non-GAAP earnings guidance of $19.04–$19.12 per share versus prior consensus near $17.81. The company now targets roughly 15% annual revenue growth through fiscal 2030, with operating margins approaching 50% and annual adjusted EPS growth in the mid-20% range, and intends to repurchase approximately $1 billion in shares over the coming months with a longer-term goal of returning up to 50% of free cash flow to shareholders. Synopsys currently holds a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy), and over the last 60 days the consensus earnings estimate has risen 6.1% to $18.26 per share, with five upward revisions and one downward revision.

Amazon.com announced on the 8th a new tablet series called the Alexa Tablet, equipped with generative artificial intelligence features. Instead of its own Fire operating system, the device runs on Google's Android, and its price has been raised sharply from previous models. Prices start at 230 dollars, with the top model, featuring 128 gigabytes of memory, at 550 dollars. The most recent previous top model, the Fire HD 10, cost just over 180 dollars. The chassis is made of aluminum, a shift toward the premium segment from the plastic-bodied Fire. Its biggest selling point is Alexa Plus, which builds AI into the Alexa voice assistant, but using it requires either a Prime membership or a subscription to the paid Alexa Plus service. A spokesperson said tablets running Fire OS will remain usable, but did not clarify whether the operating system and app store will continue to be maintained.

Amazon.com Inc. plans to deploy two million additional NVIDIA GPUs during 2027 and 2028 as part of its AI infrastructure buildout, alongside a $1.9 billion investment in its Delivery Service Partner program in 2027 that is mostly directed toward driver wages. That driver-pay commitment, which Amazon says will lift driver pay to a national average of nearly $24 an hour, brings total funding for the eight-year-old program to $21.7 billion. The company also completed a £4.25 billion sterling bond offering on September 14, 2026, across four maturities of 3, 6, 12, and 19 years, broadening its financing sources as AI spending raises capital requirements. In the second quarter, Amazon posted $200.6 billion in total revenues, up 20% from Q2 FY25, with AWS revenue jumping 37% year-over-year to $42.2 billion, while 2026 capital outlays are projected at close to $220 billion and free cash flow has slipped into negative territory. Separately, Amazon is raising base starting wages for qualifying full-time employees in core U.S. operations by $1 to $20 an hour effective September 27, a move it says reflects a commitment of over $1.5 billion.

AWS Transform now enables migration of block storage data for NetApp Inc.'s unified data storage operating system, NetApp ONTAP, directly to Amazon FSx, allowing such migrations to run in the same wave as compute and network. NetApp executive Pravjit Tiwana said cloud migration projects often run longer and cost more than planned because customers must move applications, servers, networking, and storage separately, and that the combined offering simplifies the process, lowers migration risk, and helps customers reach AWS faster without changing how their applications operate. The integration broadens NetApp's total addressable market beyond its existing users and turns AWS migration projects into new cloud storage channels, though it also increases NetApp's reliance on AWS for distribution and adoption of this particular cloud service, exposing it to AWS pricing decisions and competing storage offerings. NetApp has delivered around 102% year-to-date return in 2026, more than fivefold the return of the broader S&P 500, with a market capitalization of approximately $45.39 billion, a trailing P/E of approximately 33.3x and a forward P/E of 23.7x. As per 13F filing data for Q2 2026, a total of 47 hedge funds held positions in the stock compared to 38 by the end of the first quarter, and BlackRock is the largest institutional investor with 18.9 million shares, representing 9.62% of outstanding shares.

Amazon.com Inc introduced a redesigned hardware portfolio on Thursday, unveiling three new tablets that integrate Google's Play Store app suite and feature built-in artificial intelligence through its Alexa+ engine. The lineup marks a strategic pivot for the Seattle-based e-commerce giant, which is retiring its low-cost Fire brand in favor of premium hardware aimed at directly challenging Apple Inc and Samsung Electronics Co Ltd. The new product architecture includes the Amazon Alexa Tablet 8, 11, and 12 Pro, priced at $230, $330, and $500, respectively. By incorporating full Android app compatibility, including core platforms like Gmail, YouTube, and Google Docs alongside its native Prime and Kindle services, Amazon is seeking to eliminate the software limitations that historically relegated its hardware to budget media consumption. The aggressive release comes as the global tablet sector faces an ongoing contraction, exacerbated by lingering memory-chip supply constraints and broader macroeconomic pressure, with industry data from IDC cited by Bloomberg showing worldwide tablet shipments declined 12.3% year-over-year in the second quarter, while leader Apple is projected to post sub-2% growth in its iPad segment this year following a modest expansion in 2025. To overcome category headwinds, Amazon is relying on competitive price points and high-end features to capture market share ahead of Apple's planned iPad refresh cycle in 2027, with the flagship 12 Pro model featuring a thin aluminum unibody frame, an optional anti-glare Nanomatte display engineered alongside Corning Incorporated, and productivity accessories like a magnetic keyboard and active stylus. The tablets are available for pre-order immediately and will begin shipping in North American markets on Oct. 14, followed by a European rollout on Oct. 19.

Jim Cramer named Constellation Energy Corporation and Vistra Corp. as power stocks worth revisiting on Mad Money on October 1, citing their share-price declines and demand for nuclear electricity. Constellation announced a 20-year agreement with Amazon on September 30 covering 690 megawatts, including roughly 190 megawatts of additional capacity at Calvert Cliffs expected between 2030 and 2032, supporting more than $3 billion in infrastructure investment and the plant's proposed license extension. Constellation also raised its full-year adjusted operating earnings outlook to $11.50 to $12.50 per share after second-quarter adjusted earnings of $2.55, up from $1.91 a year earlier, helped by the addition of Calpine and favorable market conditions. Vistra reported approximately $1.77 billion in ongoing-operations adjusted EBITDA, an increase of $418 million, and reaffirmed its full-year range of $6.8 billion to $7.6 billion, though its quarterly net income declined to $305 million. Cramer noted Constellation and Vistra have pulled back 37% and 36% from their highs, respectively, and said they look cheap at these levels.

Amazon.com has acquired the former Forever 21 headquarters campus in Los Angeles to expand its logistics footprint, giving the company a large infill hub inside a dense metro area that is expected to support faster same day delivery coverage. The company has also partnered with Mothers Against Drunk Driving to promote road safety initiatives across its delivery network, sponsoring Move With MADD events in Chicago, Houston and Dallas. The Los Angeles campus deal and the MADD partnership both feed into Amazon's wider push toward logistics heavy business models, with the Forever 21 site expected to tighten same day and overnight coverage for Southern California. The key marker to watch next is whether Amazon discloses concrete operating metrics tied to the new facility, such as a measurable rise in same day or overnight delivery coverage for Southern California during 2027. Simply Wall St noted the moves sit alongside heavy AI and data center capex and a fair value estimate of $331 per share.

Amazon is expanding the AI services it sells through Amazon Web Services, with September 2026 launches that added OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra and Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 to Amazon Bedrock and brought the Amazon Quick desktop app and Amazon Connect Talent to general availability. The business already has strong traction: in the second quarter of 2026, AWS' AI business passed a $25 billion annual revenue run rate, growing at triple-digit percentages year over year, and Amazon is investing $1 billion to create AWS Forward Deployed Engineering. That demand showed up in the results, with AWS segment sales rising 37% year over year to $42.2 billion, segment operating income increasing to $16.6 billion from $10.2 billion, and AWS operating margin widening to 39.4% from 32.9% a year earlier. For the third quarter of 2026, Amazon expects net sales of $197-$202 billion, indicating 9-12% year-over-year growth, and operating income of $22.5-$26.5 billion compared with $17.4 billion a year earlier, though trailing 12-month free cash flow fell to an outflow of $7.6 billion as purchases of property and equipment rose $66.1 billion, largely for AI. Amazon faces stiff competition from Microsoft, whose Azure and other cloud services revenues rose 43% in the fiscal fourth quarter ended June 30, 2026, and Alphabet, whose Google Cloud revenues climbed 82% to $24.8 billion in the second quarter of 2026.

The Television Academy, which organizes the Emmy Awards, the highest honor in American television, announced on the 6th that Amazon.com's video streaming service Prime Video has won the rights to stream the awards ceremony and related programming. The deal runs for six years, with exclusive streaming beginning with next September's ceremony. Viewing is expected to be possible in countries around the world, even for those who are not paying subscribers. Until now, the ceremony had been broadcast on a rotating basis by the four major networks, including ABC and CBS. The Academy Awards ceremony, the film industry's biggest event, has also been televised by ABC since 1976, but from 2029 it will be streamed exclusively on YouTube. The Television Academy emphasized in a statement that the television industry has become more global than ever, and that the Emmys should be a celebration that people around the world can share.

Marvell Technology outlined a new growth target at its investor day, projecting $90 billion in revenue by its fiscal year 2031. The company also issued revised forward guidance, saying it expects upwards of $20 billion in revenue for fiscal 2028, above what Wall Street had originally expected, and put fiscal 2030 revenue between $70 billion and $90 billion, far more than original analyst estimates. The outlook rests on Marvell's custom chip business, which builds chips for customers including Google and Amazon; Marvell has a multi-year agreement with Google worth north of $100 billion if all steps are completed and certain milestones are hit. The stock rose about 7% on the news and is up 240% year to date. Marvell's results could benefit as Google and Amazon seek to reduce their dependence on Nvidia and rent out their own chips to third parties, with Amazon saying its chip business could be a $50 billion-a-year business if it did not consume most of its chips for its own processing.

Delta Air Lines has chosen Amazon's in-flight Wi-Fi over SpaceX's Starlink, a decision that drew Jim Cramer's attention back to SpaceX during the October 2 episode of Mad Money. The Delta agreement with Amazon calls for an initial installation of Amazon Leo connectivity on 500 aircraft beginning in 2028, expanding an existing technology relationship and making the choice a longer-term service investment rather than a change already reflected across Delta's fleet. Delta reported second-quarter adjusted revenue up 14% to $17.7 billion, with premium revenue rising 17% and loyalty-related revenue growing 19%, and reaffirmed full-year adjusted earnings guidance of $6.50 to $7.50 per share and free cash flow of $3 billion to $4 billion. SpaceX reported second-quarter revenue of $7.8 billion, up 92%, with AI segment revenue of approximately $2.56 billion, new cloud-service agreements contributing $1.6 billion in incremental AI infrastructure revenue, and those agreements representing $14.1 billion in contracted sales, though it posted a $541 million quarterly net loss and a $1.26 billion operating loss in its AI segment alongside approximately $15.83 billion in capital expenditures. Delta's adjusted fuel expense rose 77% to $4.4 billion in the second quarter, and the stock trades at approximately 11.9x forward earnings versus 10.4x for United Airlines, while SpaceX traded at approximately 98.2x enterprise value to trailing revenue compared with 54x for Rocket Lab. According to Insider Monkey, 75 hedge funds owned Delta shares in Q2, up from 68 in the prior quarter, while SpaceX had 119 holders with no comparable Q1 figure because it had not yet completed its IPO, and short interest stood at 4.01% for Delta and 2.43% for SpaceX.

Southwest Airlines Co. launched a first-of-its-kind U.S. airline plugin in ChatGPT, the first step in a phased AI-powered booking approach with OpenAI and Amazon Web Services. The plugin lets travelers discover and shop for Southwest flights inside ChatGPT, allowing the airline to appear earlier in the customer journey and offer a more direct path from inspiration to booking options. Sabrina Callahan, Southwest's Chief Digital and Marketing Officer, said customers are evolving how they plan travel and Southwest is helping shape what comes next, while Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer Lauren Woods said the carrier is building a secure, scalable AI foundation so it can add new capabilities more quickly. Southwest, which operates at 120 airports across 12 countries and carried more than 134 million customers in 2025, is working with OpenAI and AWS to combine AI and cloud technologies with its customer knowledge and expand AI-powered capabilities over time. The airline said more information is available at Southwest.com/chatgpt.

Elon Musk threatened that Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian "will lose his job" after the carrier chose Amazon's new Leo satellite internet for its fleet instead of SpaceX's Starlink. The public feud followed the collapse of a would-be deal between the two corporate giants this spring, and escalated after reports that Bastian told internal meetings, "We do not want to be with Elon Musk. Trust me. If you know his reputation, it's all true what they say about him." Musk also mocked Delta's proprietary Delta Sync portal as "painful, difficult and expensive for their customers," while Delta cited cost and the desire to keep connecting users through that portal as other reasons for declining Starlink. Delta's in-flight Wi-Fi is not due to be upgraded to Amazon Leo until 2028, and Amazon's offering is currently only in enterprise beta testing, though the company predicts it will beat Starlink in both upload and download speeds. The article was originally published by Moneywise.com.

Google has signed a $1 billion nuclear energy agreement with Constellation Energy, under which Alphabet will buy 20 years of nuclear power from Constellation, covering 890 megawatts of new power coming online. Constellation still has to build out that power further and will spend $4.3 billion on it, with the power feeding into the PJM grid. The deal is the latest in a string of similar arrangements, following Amazon's 690 megawatt deal with Constellation last week, and Google's standing agreements with NextEra Energy to support a restart of the Duane Arnold reactor and to upgrade some of Southern Co's nuclear plants. Data center operators are turning to nuclear because they want reliable, consistent power, and Constellation and NextEra shares have gotten a bump off the trend. The larger question for these companies is how to secure enough power for their data centers, which is becoming, along with regulation, the biggest bottleneck they face, especially with turbine makers sold out for 8 to 10 years and grid connections potentially taking 20 years.

CrowdStrike announced its fourth annual Cybersecurity Startup Accelerator, a global program for startups building the future of cybersecurity for the agentic era, alongside Amazon Web Services and NVIDIA. Applications are open worldwide through Monday, November 2, 2026, with the eight-week program running from Monday, January 11 through Monday, March 8, 2027. New this year, participants get an accelerated path to build with CrowdStrike, including access to Falcon Foundry agent creation, Falcon APIs, opportunities to develop verified integrations, and publication in the CrowdStrike Marketplace, while AWS expands go-to-market support for AWS Partner Network onboarding, technical validation, and AWS Marketplace listings, and NVIDIA Inception provides technical training and developer resources. At the conclusion of the program, up to ten startups will advance to pitch live at RSAC 2027, April 5 to 8, where the 2027 winner will be selected, and outstanding companies may also be considered for investment from the CrowdStrike Falcon Fund. The Accelerator has now supported more than 90 startups globally, with participating companies raising nearly $1 billion in funding and multiple alumni going on to be acquired; last year's winner Jazz more than doubled its book of business, nearly tripled revenue, increased inbound leads 5x, and grew its pipeline 10x, while runner-up Above Security added new customers and received a strategic investment from the Falcon Fund, and fellow cohort member Fabrix Security was acquired by Silverfort.