Amazon has lagged the broader market and most of its megacap technology peers over the last five years despite substantial gains in its share price and market value. Amazon has a market capitalization of $2.3 trillion, and its share price has moved 44% higher over the last five years, leaving it as one of only two “Magnificent Seven” companies to underperform the S&P 500’s roughly 80% increase in that span. Microsoft is the only other Magnificent Seven stock to trail the index, while Nvidia’s stock has surged 1,330% over the same period, driven by its dominance in advanced graphics processing units used for artificial intelligence processes.
The rapid rise of artificial intelligence has been a key earnings and share price catalyst for most of the Magnificent Seven, highlighting Amazon’s relative underperformance. Yet Amazon’s scale and evolving business mix position it for potentially substantial upside as artificial intelligence adoption deepens across its operations. In 2025, Amazon posted sales of $716.9 billion and surpassed Walmart to become the world’s largest company by revenue, but profitability still trails many technology peers because e-commerce remains a low-margin, cost-intensive business. While the much higher margin Amazon Web Services segment accounted for just 18% of total revenue last year, it accounted for $45.6 billion of the company’s total of $80 billion in operating income, underscoring how crucial cloud infrastructure has become to overall earnings power.
Management is already seeing Amazon Web Services benefit from rising artificial intelligence demand, and that tailwind is expected to continue. The larger long-term opportunity, however, could come from applying artificial intelligence, robotics, and automation to Amazon’s vast e-commerce operations. The company will likely be able to achieve much better margins on its e-commerce business thanks to the evolution of artificial intelligence and robotics technologies, including warehouse automation, autonomous driving, and other delivery innovations that can cut operating expenses. As the world’s largest company by revenue, even modest improvements in e-commerce margins could translate into enormous profit growth. The company is investing heavily in infrastructure to support these technologies today, and investors are betting that meaningful margin gains over the next five years could prompt the market to re-rate the stock and potentially put Amazon on a path toward a 4 trillion market capitalization.
