Amazon.com posted impressive earnings results Wednesday , and Wall Street is betting that the print only marks the beginning of a much longer stretch of strength for the hyperscaler. The technology firm on Wednesday clocked $181.52 billion in revenue for the first quarter versus the $177.3 billion expected by analyst polled by LSEG. Earnings came in at $2.78 per share, topping the Street’s consensus estimate of $1.64 per share. Amazon Web Services also accelerated to 28% year over year, largely due to its core workload shift and Trainium chip business that is gaining ground amid rising artificial intelligence demand. On top of that, the company also raised its forecast for second-quarter revenue to between $194 billion and $199 billion. Amazon shares initially popped more than 4% on Thursday before giving back that gain. “AMZN is adding the most AI capacity of any company over the next few years, and as the coming wave of Agentic AI products take form, all roads lead to AWS,” Barclays analyst Ross Sandler said Thursday in a note to clients. The bank has an overweight rating on Amazon. It also raised its price target on shares to $330 from $300, suggesting 25% upside from Wednesday’s close. The analyst’s comment comes as Amazon races against other Big Tech companies to lead the AI industry amid its ongoing boom in the industry. By the end of this year, the four major hyperscalers, Alphabet , Microsoft , Meta and Amazon , are expected to spend a combined $700 billion to drive their AI build-outs. Here’s what other analysts had to say about Amazon stock after the company’s better-than-expected earnings report. Citi: buy, $285 Analyst Jake Hallac’s price target on shares is 8% above Wednesday closing price. “We justify our valuation approach givenAWS’ accelerating growth, improving capacity visibility, expanding backlog, and continued margin progress across retail and advertising. We note Amazon’s leading position within AWS and eCommerce, its Prime membership base, growing online advertising business, and improving overall margins, which combined deserve a premium to the market, in our view. We note our $285 TP implies a ’27E EV/EBITDA multiple of ~10.5x, which is a discount to Amazon’s median FY EV/EBITDA multiple of ~17x over the last 10 years.” Morgan Stanley: overweight, $330 The price target from analyst Brian Nowak, implies 25% upside from Wednesday’s close. “We raise ’26/’27 AWS estimates, now modeling 35%/36% y/y growth. But AMZN’s Retail business is also delivering (15% y/y/ /1Q unit growth was ~400bp better than expected, N. America 1Q EBIT was ~$1bn better than expected, and top end of 2Q revenue guide even ex-Prime Day implies continued strong Retail top-line growth)… We believe AMZN has more improvements here ahead. In all, strong Retail plus surging high-margin AWS drives up our ’27 EPS by ~9%… now modeling ~$11.3 of base case ’27 EPS.” Bernstein: outperform, $315 Amazon could see upside of 20%, per analyst Mark Shmulik’s price target on the stock. “For the first time in a while, Amazon’s stock went up on the prepared remarks, a pleasant change for long-time Amazon holders waiting for the story to catch up to the numbers – and that’s mostly what we got this earnings season… [with] the revenue guidance almost reaching $200B [which] we think [will be] driven by further AWS acceleration…the Amazon story certainly feel a lot easier to own here as a steady compounder, now with AWS as an AI winner to boot.” Bank of America: buy, $310 Analyst Justin Post sees 18% upside for Amazon from its Wednesday closing price. “AWS upside without raising the capex guide suggests big AI contracts (Anthropic and OpenAI) were already factored into Amazon’s 2026 capex guide, a positive. Following the 1Q AWS margin beat and backlog growth disclosure, we expect more optimism on AWS capacity returns, warranting a higher multiple.” Mizuho: outperform, $325 Managing director Lloyd Walmsley put a price target on the stock that is 24% above its closing price on Wednesday. “Amazon reported strong results across the board, with 480bps acceleration at AWS, the backlog almost doubling (not incl Anthropic), a nice AWS margin beat, and the core retail business showing healthy double-digit growth and better margins. While the AWS growth rate came in light of expectations from some more bullish investors we spoke to, the backlog more than made up for it, with the long-term AWS growth story building steam. We believe the deals with Anthropic, OpenAI, and Meta, and the fact that OAI diversified away from Azure (MSFT, covered by Gregg Moskowitz) to get access to AWS and its customers, underscore the durable competitive position.” Canaccord: buy, $330 Analyst Maria Ripps’ price target for Amazon is 25% above the price at which shares closed on Wednesday. “AWS growth accelerated ~480 bps q/q and backlog increased nearly 50% q/q, with Amazon’s vertically integrated stack increasingly winning workloads across the full AI lifecycle. Management outlined several reasons behind this strong demand, including (1) the breadth of AWS’ AI capabilities across the stack, including SageMaker (which reduces training time by up to 40%), Bedrock (where customer spend grew 170% q/q and which processed more tokens in Q1 than in all prior years combined), and AWS’ own custom silicon, (2) leadership in agentic infrastructure, (3) the breadth and depth of AWS’ core (non-AI) services, which customers increasingly leverage as their AI footprint scales, and (4) a strong security and operational track record…That said, with AWS firing on all cylinders and resilient Commerce growth, we are raising our estimates.” Correction: Amazon reported cloud revenue growth of 28% year over year. A previous version mischaracterized the time frame.
