New York, January 8, 2026, 09:32 EST — Regular session
- Amazon shares rose about 0.3% in early trade, tracking a cautious broader tape into Friday’s U.S. jobs report.
- AWS expanded an autonomous-driving partnership with Germany’s Aumovio, keeping the AI-compute narrative in play.
- Investors are watching whether AI spending stays firm and how e-commerce demand looks after the holiday season.
Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O) shares rose 0.3% to $241.56 in early trading on Thursday after its cloud unit AWS expanded a partnership with German auto supplier Aumovio to speed up self-driving vehicle development using artificial intelligence. “The big accelerant in the industry has been the use of engineering AI,” AWS automotive and manufacturing boss Ozgur Tohumcu told Reuters. 1
Why it matters now: investors are treating AWS as Amazon’s tell on corporate tech budgets, especially for AI-heavy workloads that need expensive computing power. A steady drumbeat of customer wins can matter even when the stock move is modest.
There’s also less room for soft spots. Markets are trading the rate outlook again, and mega-cap tech tends to feel it fast when bond yields move on economic data.
AWS is also showing some pricing power at the margins of the AI boom. The company lifted prices for some reserved GPU (graphics processing unit) capacity blocks used for machine-learning training by about 15%, ITPro reported. “EC2 Capacity Blocks for ML pricing are dynamic and vary based on supply and demand patterns,” an AWS spokesperson said. 2
On the retail side, Adobe Analytics said U.S. online spending from Nov. 1 through Dec. 31 rose 6.8% to $257.8 billion, slower than the prior holiday season but ahead of Adobe’s forecast. “Competitive discounts and flexible payment options like Buy Now Pay Later” — short-term installment plans at checkout — helped drive the record, Adobe analyst Vivek Pandya said. 3
Amazon’s AI exposure runs beyond its own products. Anthropic is planning a $10 billion fundraise that would value the Claude chatbot maker at $350 billion, sources told Reuters, and the startup counts Amazon and Alphabet’s Google among its backers — a reminder of how quickly the AI trade has inflated, and how sensitive it is to sentiment shifts. 4
For the tape, the next jolt is macro. Investors were cautious ahead of the U.S. nonfarm payrolls report due on Friday, January 9, after recent data pointed to a cooling labor market, analysts said. “Both data points ended up pointing to a softening in the job picture,” CFRA’s Sam Stovall said. 5
But the setup cuts both ways. A stronger-than-expected jobs print could lift rate expectations and pressure growth stocks, while any hint that AI demand is rolling over would hit the part of the Amazon story traders have leaned on most.
What’s next is simple and close. Traders will parse Friday’s payrolls report for the rate read-through, and then turn to Amazon’s next results date — still unannounced by the company — with Nasdaq’s earnings calendar flagging Feb. 5 as an estimate. 6
