Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN), featuring a short float of 0.93% and upside potential of 17.90%, earns a spot on our list of the best cloud stocks to buy as Azure growth hits 40%.
Pixabay/ Public Domain AWS grew 28% year-over-year to $37.6 billion in the first quarter of 2026, well ahead of the 25% analysts had forecasted
Consolidated net sales reached $181.5 billion, while second-quarter guidance came in at $194 to $199 billion in net sales, comfortably above the $188.9 billion consensus. Management also reaffirmed its $200 billion AI capital investment target for the year, offering investors a degree of certainty amid an industrywide escalation in data center spending. At the same time, Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN)’s latest partnership moves were hard to ignore.
Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) brought OpenAI’s latest models and its Codex coding agent onto AWS, then committed up to $25 billion to Anthropic, with Anthropic pledging more than $100 billion in AWS expenditure over the next decade. AI services on the platform are already generating over $15 billion in annualized revenue. Wall Street took notice of that backdrop: on April 30, 2026, TD Cowen raised its price target to $350 from $300 and lifted its revenue forecasts post-earnings; Goldman Sachs moved to $325 from $275, with the analyst flagging a sharply rising backlog as the more significant indicator of where AWS growth is headed; Raymond James went to $280 from $225, making the case that the AI partnership structure and expanding agentic capabilities position AWS as the platform enterprises will build on for years.