1. Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN)
Number of Hedge Funds: 353
Top Pick Of: Seth Klarman — Baupost Group
Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) remains one of the strongest beneficiaries of the AI cycle, primarily through AWS. The shift toward AI applications, especially large-scale inference and AI agents, is structurally increasing demand for cloud infrastructure, where AWS holds a leading global market share.
AWS has built a massive backlog of approximately $464 billion, including about $138 billion from OpenAI and $100 billion from Anthropic, highlighting multi-year contracted demand and reinforcing AWS’s role as core infrastructure for the AI ecosystem. This level of backlog signals not just near-term growth, but a long-duration demand cycle tied to enterprise AI adoption.
AWS currently represents only about 20% of Amazon’s (NASDAQ:AMZN) total revenue, yet contributes roughly 60% of operating income, showing a sharp profitability concentration in the cloud segment versus the lower-margin retail business.
AWS revenue has also reached an annualized run rate of roughly $150–$155 billion, with recent growth of about 28% year-over-year, indicating re-acceleration rather than maturity slowdown.
According to a recent report by Semianalysis, AWS is seeing margin expansion versus competitors due in part to increased demand from Anthropic’s Claude workloads running on AWS Bedrock. The report says AWS is the only major cloud provider showing a consistent rising margin trend, even as the broader industry struggles with profitability pressure.
Beyond cloud, Amazon.com’s (NASDAQ:AMZN) AI opportunity is expanding into chips and custom silicon. Amazon’s AI-related revenue run-rate is now over $15 billion annually, while its broader custom silicon business exceeds a $20 billion annual run-rate, reflecting strong growth in Graviton and other in-house chip programs.
Artisan Value Fund stated the following regarding Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) in its Q1 2026 investor letter:
“We initiated four new positions in Q1, an above-average pace of activity. Typically, we add 1–2 new positions per quarter, averaging 1.7 per quarter over the past 5 years. Increased market volatility and greater dispersion in US equities created more opportunities to invest in companies that meet our three margin of safety criteria: attractive business economics, sound financial condition and compelling valuation. We also used the increased volatility to upgrade overall portfolio quality. Our three largest new positions were Amazon.com, Universal Music Group (UMG) and IQVIA Holdings.
Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) represents a high-quality, wide-moat franchise where near-term investment is potentially obscuring substantial long-term earnings power. The company’s core retail platform is underpinned by its logistics network built over decades and enhanced by significant investment during COVID that doubled the network. This infrastructure continues to drive efficiency gains and customer value, reinforcing Amazon’s dominant market position. Complementing this is AWS, the original hyperscale cloud platform and a critical profit engine, contributing roughly 60% of operating income. AWS remains a leading cloud platform and a key profit driver, with strong positioning in AI supported by proprietary chips such as Graviton and Trainium. Despite elevated capital expenditures tied to AI, logistics and other growth initiatives, Amazon’s financial position remains exceptionally strong, with significant net cash and a well-laddered debt profile. Current earnings understate normalized profitability, in our view, due to heavy reinvestment across multiple initiatives, including AI infrastructure, robotics and new delivery capabilities. As these investments mature, we believe both revenue growth and margins should expand. At our initial purchase, the stock traded near historic valuation lows relative to its earnings power, offering an opportunity to own a premium, structurally advantaged business at a market-like multiple, with potential additional upside from its fast-growing, high-margin advertising segment.”
While we acknowledge the potential of AMZN to grow, our conviction lies in the belief that some AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns and have limited downside risk. If you are looking for an AI stock that is more promising than AMZN and that has 100x upside potential, check out our report about the cheapest AI stock.
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