New York, May 28, 2026, 19:05 (EDT)
Amazon.com shares edged higher on Thursday as tech stocks climbed. Snowflake’s new $6 billion commitment to Amazon Web Services gave investors another read on AI cloud demand.
Amazon shares traded up 0.8% to $274.00, having ranged from $267.45 to $274.36 over the session. That move put the company’s market value near $2.98 trillion, just under $3 trillion.
Investors care about the timing as they look to spot AI spending that drives revenue, not just costs. Amazon’s cloud arm AWS sits at the heart of that question. The Nasdaq Composite and S&P 500 both hit record closes Thursday, lifted by falling geopolitical fears and another wave of tech optimism.
Snowflake said Wednesday it will commit $6 billion over five years to AWS infrastructure. The deal covers spending on Graviton compute and AI capacity. Graviton is Amazon’s chip line, built to make some cloud jobs cheaper or more efficient than standard chips.
AWS CEO Matt Garman said Snowflake’s bigger bet on Graviton chips would offer “performance, flexibility, and cost savings” for both data warehousing and AI jobs. Snowflake’s Sridhar Ramaswamy said both firms want to let customers use AI “directly to governed data”—meaning AI tools run on data where it already lives instead of moving it elsewhere. US Press Center
The deal isn’t big enough on its own to shift Amazon’s revenue story. Still, it signals something. AWS turned in $37.6 billion in first-quarter sales, up 28% from a year ago. Operating income was $14.2 billion, up from $11.5 billion. CEO Andy Jassy said AWS had its fastest growth in 15 quarters and pointed to Amazon’s chip unit reaching a $20 billion run rate.
Snowflake shares jumped on the news and the company’s stronger outlook. Gil Luria, managing director at D.A. Davidson, said the Amazon partnership is “another element” in Snowflake’s growth story. Reuters said the deal will expand product integration with Amazon in generative and agentic AI. Agentic AI means software that can work toward goals, not just reply to prompts. Reuters
Mixed signals from the competition. Microsoft reported Azure and other cloud services revenue up 40% last quarter, while Alphabet’s Google Cloud revenue gained 63% to $20.0 billion. AWS still has to show it can use its scale, in-house chips, and customer base to hold share as AI buyers keep moving to wherever the capacity is.
Risks remain. Amazon’s free cash flow dropped to $1.2 billion for the last 12 months, as spending on property and equipment went up, mostly due to AI. If demand from corporate AI customers cools, or if price pressure from Microsoft and Google picks up, some investors might doubt that Amazon’s big bets on data centers and chips will bring in the profits the stock now suggests.
Amazon is getting the nod from the market for its retail and ads businesses, which keep generating cash, and for its AWS unit, which is landing AI deals as signed contracts. Shares didn’t move much. Investors took the Snowflake deal as further proof, but not final evidence.
