12 Best Stocks to Buy for the AI Boom in the Second Half of 2026

8. Amazon.com Inc (NASDAQ:AMZN)

Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 353

Stock Upside Potential: 32.36%

Amazon.com Inc (NASDAQ:AMZN) is one of the best stocks to buy for the AI boom in the second half of 2026. Analysts are projecting more than 32% upside to Amazon stock at the current level. Amazon remains hugely popular with elite investors, with some 353 hedge funds having stakes in the stock.

On July 10, Amazon Web Services introduced Loom for AWS, an open‑source platform to help enterprises build and deploy AI agents with strong security controls and governance frameworks.

Loom integrates with Amazon Bedrock AgentCore and AWS Strands Agents, offering lifecycle management at scale. It enforces required resource tagging, supports role‑based access, and provides pre‑validated blueprints for deployments. Agents are launched via configuration‑driven methods, with credentials managed through AWS Secrets Manager.

The system supports both low‑code Python agents and no‑code deployments, implements OAuth2 identity propagation, and uses human‑in‑the‑loop approvals for sensitive actions. Loom also connects to the AWS Agent Registry (in preview) to manage agent records and governance reviews.

Available now via AWS Labs on GitHub, Loom targets platform engineering teams building applications with fully managed AWS services.

On July 7, BofA Securities issued its updated AI spending estimates for Amazon.com Inc (NASDAQ:AMZN) as the company races to expand its compute capacity. The brokerage expects Amazon to spend $159 billion on AI infrastructure buildout in 2026, unchanged from the previous projection. For 2027, Amazon is now projected to spend $230 billion, up from the prior estimate of $196 billion.

All together, Amazon is projected to spend $389 billion on AI capacity expansion between 2026 and 2027.

According to BofA Securities, it costs anywhere between $25 billion and $45 billion to build 1 GW of data center capacity. The brokerage believes Amazon has the lowest data center building costs among the top hyperscalers. It estimates Amazon’s costs at $25 billion per GW, compared to $37 billion per GW for Google and $45 billion per GW for Meta Platforms.

Amazon.com Inc (NASDAQ:AMZN) has a broad presence in the AI space. Its involvement in this space includes providing the infrastructure that powers AI workloads and offering AI agents suited for various tasks. Additionally, the company uses AI to power its retail and advertising businesses.