Charles Schwab's Nathan Peterson, director of derivatives research and strategy at the Schwab Center for Financial Research, summed up the split tape after Wednesday's mega-cap tech reports with a clear thesis on the Schwab Market Update Audio episode “Mag 7 Earnings, GDP, and Inflation In-Focus.
AMZN's Q1 sales jump 17% to $181.5B as AWS posts fastest growth in 15 quarters, powering record margins and strong profit surge.
Shares of tech giant Amazon.com Inc NASDAQ: AMZN opened at a fresh all-time high on Thursday, 30 April, following their earnings report the previous night. It's the latest leg in a strong rally that's seen the stock gain more than 35% since the end of March.
Independent sellers in Amazon's store saved time and money by adopting artificial intelligence (AI) tools in 2025, the company said in a report released Thursday (April 30). Amazon outlined this and other trends among sellers in a press release outlining findings from its latest annual Small Business Empowerment Report.
Amazon.com Inc (NASDAQ:AMZN) shares are down 1.1% to trade at $260.06 at last glance, even after the tech titan reported adjusted first-quarter earnings of $2.78 per share on $181.52 billion in revenue, both of which surpassed estimates.
NVDA, MU, AVGO, WDC, VRT and peers stand to gain as Big Tech lifts AI capex to $725B by 2026, fueling demand for chips, memory, and data center infrastructure.
As Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT | MSFT Price Prediction), Meta, Alphabet, and Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) announced earnings, they reiterated the amounts they would spend on AI data centers, and some said they were committed to continued growth.
Amazon's Q1 blew past expectations on both the top and bottom lines. The strong showing was fueled in part by a nearly 30% increase in revenues from Amazon Web Services. The growth in Web Services validates the massive investments being undertaken by Amazon in its new data centers.
Amazon.com, Inc. remains the dominant e-commerce player, with AWS driving significant growth in its cloud business. My Strong Buy upgrade was based on the market underestimating AWS's ability to rapidly monetize the AI boom. AMZN shares have surged roughly 30% since my last note, outperforming the S&P 500 as investors recognize AWS's AI-driven earnings power.
Amazon delivered 17% YoY revenue growth in Q1, with a robust beat on revenue, EPS, and Q2 guidance. AMZN's high-margin segments—third-party seller services, advertising, and subscriptions—showed double-digit growth, driving operating margin expansion across regions. AWS revenue surged 28% YoY, with a $364 billion backlog supporting long-term cloud growth and continued heavy CapEx investment.
Amazon's Leo will be "six times better on the uplink performance than existing alternatives," CEO Andy Jassy said.
Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN) Q1 2026 Earnings Call Transcript