4. Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN)
YTD Stock Performance: +14%
Philippe Laffont’s Stake: $2.29 Billion
Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) has quickly evolved from just an e-commerce and cloud company into a broader AI infrastructure giant, with growth coming from cloud services (AWS), advertising, and now its own AI chips business. A key part of this is Amazon.com’s (NASDAQ:AMZN) custom chips like Trainium and Graviton, along with networking hardware such as Nitro. These chips are used to train and run AI models more efficiently, helping both Amazon and its customers reduce reliance on external chipmakers like Nvidia.
The scale of this business is already significant, with an annual revenue run rate of over $20 billion and growing at triple-digit rates year over year. Demand is coming from major customers hungry for AI chips. Meta recently announced a deal with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to bring tens of millions of AWS Graviton cores into Meta’s compute portfolio. OpenAI has committed to spending around $100 billion on AWS over time in exchange for large-scale infrastructure access, and Anthropic has also expanded its relationship with Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) with multibillion-dollar investments.
Cloud remains the biggest long-term catalyst for Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN). It has a roughly 30–32% share of the global cloud infrastructure market, ahead of Microsoft and Google. AWS moat remains strong because the reliability and scalability it provides to large corporations. Switching costs in the cloud market are high as migrating enterprise systems can cost millions and take years, helping maintain stable recurring revenue.
AWS ecosystem of services is another strong business moat. Unlike Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, AWS offers 240+ cloud services, allowing companies to build, train and deploy AI models, store data, run applications and manage cybersecurity within one platform, increasing switching costs and strengthening customer lock-in over time.
Vulcan Value Partners stated the following regarding Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) in its Q1 2026 investor letter:
“There were seven material detractors to performance: Ares Management Corporation, Ryan Specialty Holdings, Inc., Microsoft Corporation, Salesforce, Inc., UnitedHealth Group Incorporated, Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN), and SAP SE. Amazon reported strong results for its fiscal year and fourth quarter. During the fourth quarter, AWS’s revenue increased 24% and highly profitable advertising revenue grew 22%. AWS is benefitting from AI driven demand for its cloud services and its growth is accelerating. In addition, Amazon is aggressively building out its promising Leo satellite service that will compete with Starlink. As a result, Amazon’s capital spending is forecast to increase over 50% in 2026 to approximately $200 billion. We expect a solid return on this capital spending. Bears believe that Amazon is investing too much money in capital spending. Our view is that it is a darn good problem to have and that Amazon will become even more competitively entrenched as the leading cloud services provider in the world.”
