Ken Fisher included Amazon.com, Inc. in his latest "10 Best Stocks to Buy" because the company is as much an AI infrastructure play as it is an e-commerce giant: its cloud business, custom Trainium chips and deep partnerships with Anthropic and OpenAI make Amzn a core way to own generative-AI demand.
The endorsement lands with market moves and recent analyst attention. Amzn shares are up 22% over the past year and 12.2% year-to-date, and on May 29 Truist raised its share-price target to $320 from $310 while keeping a Buy rating — citing AWS revenue estimates and the company’s ties to Anthropic and OpenAI.
Those ties are concrete. Vulcan Value Partners flagged AWS revenue growth of 24% in the fourth quarter and said Amazon’s "highly profitable advertising revenue grew 22%" over the same period. Anthropic has committed to spending more than $100 billion to use Amazon’s cloud, and Amazon will invest as much as $25 billion in Anthropic — a large portion of that investment tied to performance milestones.
Amazon’s management has framed generative AI as a transformational opportunity. CEO Andy Jassy described generative AI as a "once-in-a-lifetime" technology, and the company has been building the hardware and services — from Trainium chips to expanded datacenter capacity — that customers need to train and run large models.
Those operational facts show why Fisher would single out the stock: AWS is already a growth engine, advertising is highly profitable, and multibillion-dollar commitments from Anthropic lock in demand for Amazon’s infrastructure for years. Vulcan summed the quarter as strong, writing, "Amazon reported strong results for its fiscal year and fourth quarter." It also said, "AWS is benefitting from AI driven demand for its cloud services and its growth is accelerating."
Valuation and comparisons sharpen the investment case. Amzn trades at a forward P/E of 25.64 versus the market’s 27.66, putting it below broad-market multiples even as it sits atop rising AI demand. By contrast, the supplementary figures show Microsoft shares are down 7.8% over the past year and 9.7% year-to-date and traded at a forward P/E of 19.46 — a reminder that cloud leaders sit in different valuation buckets depending on market confidence in their AI paths.
That confidence is not unanimous. Vulcan explicitly noted a key friction: "Bears believe that Amazon is investing too much money in capital spending." The firm also quantified that buildup, saying Amazon’s capital spending is forecast to increase over 50% in 2026 to approximately $200 billion. Vulcan pushed back: "Our view is that it is a darn good problem to have and that Amazon will become even more competitively entrenched as the leading cloud services provider in the world." It also flagged Amazon’s push into satellites with its Leo service to compete with Starlink, another example of large, forward-leaning infrastructure bets.
The practical consequence for investors is a trade-off between scale and near-term returns. Amazon’s doubled-down spending should lock customers and capacity, but it also raises the question of when and how that spending will show up as incremental profit. Truist’s higher target and Vulcan’s praise reflect a belief that scale and customer commitments — including Anthropic’s multi-hundred-billion-dollar cloud usage and milestone-based Amazon investment — will pay off over time.
The single unanswered test is clear and looming: how much of Amazon’s planned 2026 capital spending will translate into measurable AI or cloud profit gains. The next concrete milestones to watch are the company’s 2026 capex disclosures and the schedule of Anthropic’s milestone payments; those items will determine whether Fisher’s inclusion of Amzn in his AI-themed picks proves prescient or premature.
