Amazon Stock Today: Holiday Rally, AI Spending and Regulatory Heat Shape AMZN’s Next Move (November 29, 2025)

Published: November 29, 2025

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) heads into the heart of the holiday shopping season with its share price back near recent highs, analysts broadly bullish, and regulators still very much in the picture. Investors now have to weigh a powerful AI‑and‑cloud growth story against record‑level capital spending and a growing stack of legal and policy fights.

Amazon stock today: price and recent performance

Amazon closed Friday at $233.22, up 1.77% on the day, with after‑hours trading roughly flat at $233.11. ^[1]

Over the past few weeks:

Shares peaked above $258 in early November, then slid sharply mid‑month, briefly dipping below $220 before rebounding. ^[2]
From the mid‑November low around $217 to Friday’s close, AMZN has climbed roughly 7%. ^[3]
The stock now trades about 10% below its early‑November high but roughly 6% above its 2024 year‑end level of $219.39, according to long‑term price data. ^[4]

At current levels, Amazon’s market capitalization is around $2.4 trillion, keeping it firmly in megacap territory and a core weight in many major indices and AI‑themed funds. ^[5]

Q3 2025 earnings: AI and AWS re‑accelerate

Much of the current debate around Amazon stock is anchored in its Q3 FY 2025 results, reported earlier this month:

Revenue: $180.2 billion, up 13% year‑over‑year, beating Wall Street estimates of about $177.8 billion.
Segment revenue:
- North America: $106.3 billion (+11% YoY)
- International: $40.9 billion (+14% YoY)
- Amazon Web Services (AWS): $33.0 billion (+20% YoY) – a clear re‑acceleration. ^[6]
Operating income: $17.4 billion (9.7% margin). Excluding roughly $4.3 billion in special charges, operating income would have been $21.7 billion. ^[7]
Net income: $21.2 billion, up 38% YoY, with diluted EPS of $1.95, up 36%. ^[8]

Several details matter for the stock:

AWS & AI infrastructure: Amazon highlighted renewed AWS momentum as AI workloads scale, noting an annualized AWS revenue run rate around $132 billion, a backlog that has reached roughly $200 billion, and more than 3.8 gigawatts of power capacity added over the past 12 months, with more to come. ^[9]
Advertising: Amazon Ads revenue hit about $17.7 billion in Q3, growing in the low‑20% range year‑over‑year, making advertising a second major high‑margin engine alongside AWS. ^[10]
Capex surge: Management guided to approximately $125 billion of capital expenditures in 2025, up from already elevated levels, and signaled even higher investment in 2026 – largely for AI and cloud infrastructure. ^[11]

The company’s Q4 2025 revenue guidance of $206–213 billion and operating income outlook of $21–26 billion underline confidence heading into peak season but also highlight how much depends on monetizing that AI‑heavy spend. ^[12]

Holiday shopping, Black Friday strikes and new growth bets

Online demand and the Black Friday backdrop

Black Friday 2025 is skewing more digital than ever. Adobe Analytics and Reuters estimated U.S. consumers spent about $8.6 billion online on Black Friday alone, reflecting a shift from long in‑store lines to phones and laptops. ^[13]

Amazon doesn’t disclose real‑time holiday sales by day, but the stock’s rebound this week suggests investors are at least comfortable with early traffic and spending trends. Zacks and other research shops have repeatedly highlighted Amazon as a key beneficiary of holiday e‑commerce demand, including in “Black Friday boost” retail round‑ups. ^[14]

Labor tensions: Germany strikes, U.S. labor law win

Holiday operations have not been entirely smooth:

Germany: Reuters reported union‑led strikes at Amazon warehouses in Germany on Black Friday, part of a long‑running campaign over pay and working conditions. The company said customer impact would be limited thanks to its network redundancy. ^[15]
United States: Just days earlier, Amazon won a preliminary injunction blocking New York’s Public Employment Relations Board from enforcing a new state labor law that would let it handle certain private‑sector cases while the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) lacks a quorum. ^[16]

The New York case arose from the firing of a union vice president at the company’s JFK8 Staten Island warehouse—Amazon’s only unionized U.S. facility—and underscores how labor disputes remain a live risk factor, even as the company prevails in some court battles. ^[17]

Expanding into consumer finance in India

Beyond retail and AWS, Amazon is moving deeper into financial services:

Reuters reported this week that Amazon is preparing to offer tailored loans to small businesses in India via Axio, a non‑bank lender it acquired earlier in 2025.
Axio, which had focused on buy‑now‑pay‑later (BNPL) and personal loans, will re‑enter SME lending, while Amazon also experiments with fixed‑deposit savings products via Amazon Pay in partnership with local banks. ^[18]

For investors, the India push is small relative to AWS or core retail, but it shows how Amazon continues to use its data and payments footprint to probe new high‑margin verticals.

Regulatory spotlight: $2.5 billion Prime settlement and EU cloud probe

The FTC’s historic Prime settlement

The biggest regulatory headline for Amazon in 2025 remains its $2.5 billion settlement with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) over Prime subscription practices:

Amazon agreed to pay $1 billion in civil penalties and $1.5 billion for refunds to more than 30 million Prime customers after the FTC alleged it used deceptive “dark patterns” to push sign‑ups and made cancellation too difficult. ^[19]
Eligible subscribers—generally those who enrolled between June 2019 and June 2025 via certain confusing offers and used few Prime benefits—can receive automatic refunds of up to $51, with Amazon distributing payments between November 12 and December 24, 2025. ^[20]

Under the settlement, Amazon must redesign its checkout and cancellation flows for Prime, provide clearer disclosures, and submit to oversight by an independent monitor. ^[21]

Financially, a $2.5 billion charge is material but not crushing for a company generating tens of billions in annual profit and over $700 billion in annual revenue. Reputationally, it reinforces that regulators view Amazon as a test case for how far big tech can go with subscription nudges and interface design.

EU Digital Markets Act: new scrutiny for AWS

On the other side of the Atlantic, the European Commission has opened a probe into the cloud computing services of Amazon and Microsoft under the Digital Markets Act (DMA). ^[22]

Regulators are examining whether:

AWS and Azure should be formally added as “gatekeeper” cloud services,
Pricing structures (such as data egress fees) and bundling practices unfairly lock in customers or disadvantage rivals. ^[23]

If cloud services are fully pulled into the DMA regime, Amazon could face obligations to make some services more interoperable and avoid self‑preferencing, with potential fines of up to 10% of global annual turnover for violations. ^[24]

For AMZN shareholders, the takeaway is not an immediate hit to earnings but a rising probability that parts of its business model—especially in subscription and cloud—will be nudged toward more open and less sticky designs over the next few years.

Analyst sentiment: “Strong Buy” consensus, but AI capex divides opinions

Despite regulatory noise, Wall Street remains broadly constructive on Amazon stock. The twist is that nearly everyone loves the growth story, but not everyone agrees on the payoff from massive AI spending.

Street targets and growth forecasts

According to aggregated analyst data:

47 analysts covering Amazon currently assign a consensus rating of “Strong Buy”.
The average 12‑month price target is about $280.47, implying roughly 20% upside from Friday’s close, with targets ranging from $195 to $335. ^[25]
Street forecasts call for revenue of ~$726.8 billion in 2025 (up about 14% YoY) and $806 billion in 2026, roughly 11% growth. Consensus EPS is $7.14 for 2025 and $7.98 for 2026, implying nearly 29% earnings growth this year and low‑double‑digit growth next year. ^[26]

Zacks assigns Amazon a Rank #2 (Buy) with a Growth Style Score of B and notes that 13 analysts have raised 2025 earnings estimates over the last two months, pushing the consensus higher and leaving the company with an average earnings surprise above 20%. ^[27]

Some high‑profile analysts have also reiterated or lifted bullish targets since the Q3 report:

Rosenblatt has a $305 target and “Strong Buy” rating.
Mizuho recently nudged its target from $300 to $315 while maintaining a “Buy”.
Wells Fargo raised its target to $292. ^[28]

Separately, 24/7 Wall St. pegs Wall Street’s median one‑year target at $294.97 and maintains its own base‑case year‑end 2025 forecast of $250.85, implying modest additional upside from today’s price. ^[29]

Skepticism around AI economics

Not everyone is fully on board with the AI capex binge. A recent note highlighted by GuruFocus reported that Redburn, part of Rothschild & Co, downgraded Amazon (and Microsoft) from “Buy” to Neutral, arguing that the net present value of current generative‑AI infrastructure spending could be far lower than earlier waves of cloud investment. ^[30]

Redburn’s thesis:

AI infrastructure is more capital‑intensive,
pricing power might be weaker as competition intensifies,
much of the long‑term value could accrue to model providers rather than cloud platforms themselves. ^[31]

Investors now have to choose which side of that debate they trust: the dozens of analysts who see sustained margin expansion as AI workloads fill data centers, or the skeptics who fear a long slog before returns catch up to spending.

Long‑term story: AI, Nova, ads and “flywheel” businesses

Looking beyond the next few quarters, several structural growth pillars shape the AMZN investment case.

AI and Nova

Analysts at 24/7 Wall St. note that Amazon plans to launch a proprietary AI model called Nova, pitched as a lower‑cost alternative to leading systems like ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s latest Gemini models. ^[32]

Combined with AWS Trainium custom chips, the Bedrock AI platform and a growing ecosystem of agentic AI tools, Amazon is trying to ensure that AI demand doesn’t just boost AWS revenue, but does so on infrastructure it owns and can monetize more efficiently. ^[33]

Advertising and retail flywheel

Amazon’s ad business is quietly becoming a giant in its own right:

Q3 2025 advertising revenue of $17.7 billion (low‑20s percent growth) already puts Amazon in the top tier of global digital ad platforms. ^[34]

24/7 Wall St. estimates that Amazon Ads is already a $47 billion annualized business and could compound at a high‑teens rate through the decade if retail and media integrations continue to scale. ^[35]

At the same time, Amazon is leaning into AI‑assisted shopping features like its Rufus assistant and same‑day grocery expansion, which third‑party analysts argue are increasing conversion and engagement in core e‑commerce. ^[36]

Forecasts to 2030

In a long‑term scenario that assumes:

AWS holds its own in cloud market share,
e‑commerce margins gradually improve with robotics and logistics efficiency,
advertising keeps growing in the high teens,

24/7 Wall St. models Amazon reaching $1.15 trillion in revenue and about $131 billion in net income by 2030, with a hypothetical share price around $524.67 – more than 100% above current levels. ^[37]

Those numbers are inherently speculative, but they illustrate why many investors still see Amazon as a long‑duration compounder rather than a mature utility‑like business.

Key risks and what to watch next

Investors tracking Amazon stock in the coming weeks and months will be watching several themes:

Holiday quarter execution: Did Amazon translate Black Friday/Cyber Monday traffic into profitable growth, or did steep discounts and logistics costs eat into margins? Q4 results and guidance for 2026 will answer that. ^[38]
AI monetization vs. capex burn: Can AWS and AI‑driven services grow fast enough – and at high enough margins – to justify a triple‑digit billion‑dollar capex run‑rate? ^[39]
Regulatory overhang: The FTC Prime settlement, EU DMA cloud probe, and ongoing labor disputes (in both Europe and the U.S.) could change how Amazon designs subscriptions, handles data, and interacts with workers, potentially affecting both growth and costs. ^[40]
Macro backdrop: As a consumer‑exposed business with a large advertising unit, Amazon is sensitive to shifts in discretionary spending, ad budgets and corporate IT investment cycles.

For now, the market’s verdict on November 29, 2025 is cautiously optimistic: AMZN is priced as a premium growth stock with a still‑dominant position in e‑commerce, cloud and digital ads, but also under intense scrutiny and in the middle of one of the most capital‑intensive transitions in its history.

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