NEW YORK, December 31, 2025, 4:28 PM ET — After-hours
- Amazon shares were down about 0.7% in late trading, tracking a year-end dip in U.S. equities.
- A U.S. appeals court ruling this week kept Amazon’s challenge to the labor board’s structure from being heard in court.
- Investors are looking ahead to the next earnings report, expected in early February.
Amazon.com (AMZN.O) shares slipped 0.7% to $230.82 in after-hours trading on Wednesday after a soft finish to the last regular session of 2025. The stock traded between $230.70 and $233.01 on the day.
The drop came as Wall Street’s major indexes ended the year’s final trading session lower in thin holiday trading ahead of Thursday’s New Year’s Day market closure. “I do not expect that the last few days will have so much bearing on the performance of the next year,” said Giuseppe Sette, co-founder and president of Reflexivity. Reuters
Why it matters now: Amazon is a heavyweight in the megacap tech complex that has steered index performance, and late-December moves can be amplified by lighter liquidity and portfolio rebalancing.
The selling also lands as investors reset for 2026 with a sharp focus on two swing factors for Amazon: demand for cloud computing tied to artificial-intelligence spending, and regulatory and labor costs that can affect fulfillment and delivery.
On the legal front, a U.S. appeals court said it could not hear Amazon’s challenge to the structure of the National Labor Relations Board, citing a federal law that limits court injunctions in labor disputes. The ruling deepened a split among U.S. appeals courts, increasing the chances the U.S. Supreme Court may ultimately weigh in.
The underlying dispute stems from an NLRB case alleging Amazon was a “joint employer” of drivers working for a contractor — meaning it would share responsibility for employment terms — which Amazon has denied.
Investors have also been tracking Amazon’s positioning in the AI buildout. Reuters reported on Tuesday that Amazon was considering an investment of around $10 billion in OpenAI, while noting talks were “very fluid,” as large tech and cloud players commit billions to secure computing capacity. Reuters
The bigger question for the stock remains whether Amazon can keep turning AI-related demand into faster growth at Amazon Web Services, which drives a large share of the company’s profits. Amazon said in late October that AWS revenue rose 20% in the third quarter, and it projected fourth-quarter net sales of $206 billion to $213 billion, while AWS continues to face intense competition from Microsoft and Google in cloud.
The next major catalyst is earnings. Amazon is estimated to report results on Feb. 5, 2026, according to Nasdaq and Yahoo Finance earnings calendars, though the company has not confirmed a date.
Traders will be watching for updates on AWS growth, spending plans for data centers and AI infrastructure, and any signal on operating margins after heavy investment.
U.S. markets reopen on Friday, when investors will get the first full session of 2026 positioning after the holiday pause, with megacap tech sentiment likely to set the tone.
For Amazon, Wednesday’s close near the bottom of the day’s range underscored a cautious year-end tape — and put the spotlight back on the February results and the company’s legal and labor overhangs heading into the new year.
