NEW YORK, July 2, 2026, 5:01 PM EDT
- Amazon.com Inc NASDAQ:AMZN last traded at $242.67, rising 0.34%. The Nasdaq Composite lost 0.87%.
- AWS rolled out a pair of $1 billion projects to investors this week—a generative AI engineer service for clients, plus cloud credits aimed at U.S. intelligence agencies.
- The AI engineer pledge amounts to roughly 0.7% of AWS’s trailing 12-month revenue and around 2.1% of its trailing operating profit.
- U.S. stock markets are closed Friday, July 3, for the Independence Day holiday.
Amazon.com Inc NASDAQ:AMZN ticked higher late Thursday while the Nasdaq slipped. The move was modest but gave investors a clearer signal than the overall index performance. Traders looked at AWS’s newest AI-services pitch as a shot at turning big AI outlays into actual customer sales, instead of just higher data center costs. Shares last traded at $242.67, up 82 cents, or 0.34%, with 47.2 million shares changing hands. Market cap is around $2.64 trillion.
| Name | Latest quote/close | Day move | Investor read |
|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon.com Inc NASDAQ:AMZN | $242.67 | +0.34% | Outpaced Nasdaq with a 121 basis point spread |
| Nasdaq Composite | 25,813.75 | -0.87% | Tech sector slid |
| S&P 500 | 7,478.66 | -0.06% | Broad index dipped a bit |
| Microsoft Corp NASDAQ:MSFT | $390.49 | +1.42% | AI peer made gains |
| Alphabet Inc NASDAQ:GOOGL | $359.91 | -0.50% | Cloud name slipped |
| Walmart Inc NYSE:WMT | $111.84 | +2.65% | Retail peer led |
Company quote numbers use the latest data, index numbers are Reuters’ preliminary closes.
AWS is out front here. At its AWS Summit in Washington, Amazon said it will run a $1 billion cloud incentive program for U.S. Intelligence Community agencies through October 2030. The company is also giving up to $20 million in credits to support classified cloud for defense, and putting $1 billion into Forward Deployed Engineering teams to send AWS AI engineers to work directly with customers.
Francessca Vasquez, AWS vice president of Frontier AI Engineering and Services, said customers want “expert AI engineers working directly with their teams.” AWS said its new group is already working with customers like the Allen Institute, Cox Automotive, NBA, Ricoh, Southwest Airlines and the NFL. Amazon News
| Scale check | Amount | $1 billion FDE commitment as % |
|---|---|---|
| AWS sales over the past year | $137.0 billion | 0.7% |
| AWS operating income for last twelve months | $48.2 billion | 2.1% |
| Amazon total market cap | $2.64 trillion | 0.04% |
| Amazon free cash flow, past year | $1.2 billion | 81.2% |
The last line measures scale, not cash timing. That’s the point of the program. Amazon’s free cash flow dropped to $1.2 billion for the trailing 12 months to March 31, down from $25.9 billion a year ago, as property and equipment buys jumped $59.3 billion—mostly for AI. AWS sales in the quarter were up 28% to $37.6 billion. AWS operating income moved up to $14.2 billion.
CEO Andy Jassy said AWS just posted its “fastest growth in 15 quarters.” He added Amazon’s custom chips business is at a $20 billion revenue run rate. At this point, investors are less concerned about Amazon’s AI spend. The focus now is how products like FDE can keep AI customers active enough to protect AWS margins. Amazon Investor Relations
The competition edged higher Thursday. Microsoft Corp NASDAQ:MSFT announced it will launch Microsoft Frontier Company, putting $2.5 billion behind an effort to help customers select and combine AI tools. “Three years ago, when we built Copilot, we made a mistake by binding it to OpenAI models only,” Judson Althoff, CEO of Microsoft Commercial Business, told Reuters. Reuters
Reuters said Microsoft’s latest firm enters the market alongside Palantir Technologies Inc NASDAQ:PLTR and Amazon Web Services, all pitching hands-on AI adoption. Patrick Moorhead, CEO at Moor Insights & Strategy, told Reuters that some large customers worry these frontier labs might use project experience to later compete in sectors like coding and legal.
Amazon still benefits from retail. Adobe Inc NASDAQ:ADBE data cited by Bloomberg showed U.S. online spending across all retailers reached $26.4 billion during Amazon’s June 23-26 Prime Day sale, up 9.3% from a year ago. Amazon does not give out its own Prime Day sales and has said third-party figures are often wrong. Jamil Ghani, vice president of Amazon Prime, called Prime Day the “biggest shopping event of the year exclusively for members.” Fortune
U.S. jobs data missed forecasts in June, with 57,000 positions added compared to the expected 110,000, and chip stocks took a hit. “You can really point the finger at the consolidation in the chips,” Bruce Zaro at Granite Wealth Management told Reuters. Adam Sarhan at 50 Park Investments said the weaker jobs print “takes the pressure off the Fed” to hike rates soon. Reuters
Amazon’s outlook for the second quarter, put out in April, was net sales between $194 billion and $199 billion, with operating income coming in between $20 billion and $24 billion. This guidance factored in Prime Day landing in the quarter.
