Amazon flies on Wall Street: worth more than 2 trillion

Amazon makes its grand entrance into the elite of tech giants with over two trillion dollars in market capitalisation, the result of rallies that have marked the new era of betting on artificial intelligence. With an upward spurt during the session of around 4%, the e-commerce, cloud and Internet player crossed the rare milestone for the first time.

Amazon has thus joined Microsoft, Apple and Nvidia, which today vie for the absolute market cap over the three trillion mark. And also to Alphabet, which travels around the 2.3 trillion mark. For Amazon, the arrival in what are now the 'magnificent five' of the stock market is the result of a shockstart that has seen the shares rise by more than 25 per cent this year and by more than 50 per cent over the past twelve months. A measure of the optimism is offered by the Nasdaq index, which although loaded with technology brands has risen by a more limited 18 per cent since January.

The move from one trillion to two trillion took the group more than four years, however, a journey that pales in comparison to the exploits achieved by Nvidia, the biggest symbol of investors' hunger for AI even if it has recently been at the centre of downturns after a great run: the company only needed 180 days to make the same milestone. The AI-engaged server chip giant then needed even less time, just 96 sessions, to push itself from two trillion to three trillion.

It should also be remembered that for Amazon, this represents a potential return to great glories already known on the stock exchange, albeit at lower absolute valuations: in the past decade, it had also managed to become queen of the market cap, vaulting over the trillion-dollar mark on Wall Street in 2018 and outperforming Apple itself. Two years later it had again reached that peak, only to lose it.

The group led by Andy Jassy, at least according to its advocates, may nevertheless have now entered a new positive season in the eyes of investors. After a series of delays, it is benefiting from a more convinced turn towards the frontier of innovation, namely artificial intelligence, which dominates the attention in hi-tech and beyond: in his latest letter to shareholders, the 56-year-old chief executive Jassy openly claimed the central role of generative artificial intelligence, defining it as the new pillar of the company's all-round growth, from e-commerce to the cloud of Amazon Web Services to Amazon Prime services. According to US press rumours, Jassy is now personally involved in the development of a novel chatbot alternative to ChatGPT, a project called Metis.