New York, Feb 23, 2026, 10:05 (EST) — Regular session
- Amazon shares slipped at the open, lagging behind the wider market.
- Wall Street slipped at the open, with investors weighing changes to U.S. tariff strategy.
- Tuesday’s tariff shift is on traders’ radar, with Nvidia set to report on Feb. 25.
Amazon.com Inc slipped 1.7% to $206.46 in Monday morning trading, deepening recent volatility for the megacap as investors backed off risk.
U.S. stocks slipped out of the gate, reacting to President Donald Trump’s decision to impose a fresh 15% duty right after the Supreme Court tossed out his earlier, wider tariffs. Uncertainty flared again around the pace and endpoint of tariff policy.
Amazon slipped behind early. Invesco QQQ, tracking the Nasdaq 100, dropped roughly 0.6%, while the S&P 500’s SPY ETF eased about 0.3%.
The White House, in a fact sheet dated Feb. 20, laid out details of its Section 122 move: a 10% import duty will hit on Feb. 24 at 12:01 a.m. Eastern, sticking around for 150 days. Exemptions? Plenty, according to the document.
Over the weekend, Trump announced plans to bump the temporary global tariff from 10% up to 15%—hitting the ceiling set by Section 122. Trade lawyers note this is uncharted legal territory and warn it may still face court fights.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection announced it will halt collection of tariffs set under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, an economic emergency statute, starting at 12:01 a.m. EST Tuesday. The move follows the Supreme Court decision.
Amazon’s cloud business, central to the company’s profits, returned to headlines after it challenged reports linking an AWS outage to an AI coding agent. According to a blog post from AWS, the disruption in December was caused by “user error—specifically misconfigured access controls,” not by the AI tool—and core compute, storage, and database services were unaffected. Amazon News
The Verge said the incident caused a 13-hour outage across sections of mainland China, with Amazon chalking it up to a human permissions slip—definitely not a case of “AI gone rogue.” The Verge
The stock’s still processing Amazon’s capital spending update from earlier this month. Amazon laid out plans for $200 billion in capital expenditures for 2026, targeting equipment and data centers—heavy investments for its AI infrastructure. D.A. Davidson’s Gil Luria put it simply: Amazon “has to invest at these levels just to stay in the race.” Reuters
The spending fight isn’t just Amazon’s problem—cloud competitors like Microsoft and Alphabet are facing investor pressure to prove their hefty investments can deliver results quickly.
Still, a trade-driven selloff can reverse with little warning. Should the rollout of tariffs get more tangled than advertised, or if a fresh legal challenge hits, repricing could happen fast. High spenders such as Amazon often catch the worst of it when anxiety spikes.
First on the radar: traders are eyeing the tariff handoff set for Tuesday, Feb. 24, and looking for any new signals from border agencies. Attention quickly shifts to Nvidia, with its quarterly earnings and a conference call slated for Wednesday, Feb. 25 at 5 p.m. ET — a key moment for anyone tracking AI momentum, since Nvidia has been driving sentiment across the sector.
