Shares in Amazon (AMZN) inventory closed Tuesday at $232.14, up 4% within the final 5 buying and selling periods. In the meantime, its Magnificent-7 inventory rival Alphabet (GOOGL) is up a modest 2% in that very same interval, closing Tuesday at $314. Whereas GOOGL took the magnificent-7 crown in 2025, the grouping has been quite a bit tighter collectively within the latter months of the 12 months, due to the AI race. All the grouping have closely invested in AI this 12 months, leading to big beneficial properties to investor curiosity. Whereas Amazon inventory has been a constant purchase this 12 months, it enters 2026 sitting barely behind Alphabet (GOOGL). Thankfully, that development has a strong probability of fixing subsequent 12 months.
YTD, AMZN is just up 5%, however that’s largely as a result of poor Spring season that despatched most US shares plummeting. With its AI prospects booming and AWS cloud computing trying promising, Amazon has loads of potential in 2026. Because of this, there are various bullish inventory forecasts for AMZN. Certainly, present value targets vary from $244 to $340, indicating potential upside from the present market value of $232.
Truist Securities analyst Youssef Squali forecasts Amazon’s progress at 10.5% in 2026, down from 12.1% in 2025, fueled by robust progress elements and AI-driven companies. Amazon’s proposed take care of OpenAI might show a worthy catalyst to ship AMZN shares greater subsequent 12 months. Certainly, the e-commerce big is in talks with Sam Altman’s OpenAI, which hosts the world’s high AI platform ChatGPT, for a possible funding of $10 billion. The talks additionally point out that OpenAI might use Amazon’s in-house Trainium chips as a part of the provide. If the deal goes via, it will be a major breakthrough for Amazon’s comparatively younger semiconductor enterprise.
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On the flip facet, loads of eyes have been on Alphabet (GOOGL) not too long ago, due to its in-house tensor processing items (TPU). A number of specialists predict that Alphabet’s TPUs might turn into a significant income driver that sends GOOGL inventory greater. These application-specific chips have lengthy been the spine of Google Cloud, and buyers are warming to the concept promoting them externally may very well be a profitable extension of that technique. Analysts level to current momentum triggers, together with Alphabet’s dedication to produce tens of billions of {dollars} of TPUs to Anthropic and stories that Meta could also be in talks to spend billions.
A lot of Amazon’s lackluster current efficiency will be tied to the expansion of AWS, which trails that of Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. Nevertheless, Amazon noticed AWS income progress speed up to twenty% final quarter, and the corporate mentioned it was capacity-constrained. As such, it’s boosting its capital expenditure (capex) finances to attempt to meet rising demand. This might imply a strong begin to the 12 months that may set the tempo for AMZN to catch as much as GOOGL within the AI race.
