Amazon’s bull run is gathering pace — and Barclays has just planted its flag in the bull camp, naming AMZN its top mega-cap pick. The bank points to fresh disclosures that strengthen the bullish thesis: AWS’s exploding AI business, a meaningful in-house chip franchise, a fast-growing grocery moat, and broad Wall Street backing.
Why AWS is the centrepiece
- AWS AI revenue reached a $15 billion annualized run rate in Q1 2026, and Barclays says that figure is “ascending rapidly.”
- Amazon’s CEO Andy Jassy reported AWS grew 24% year-over-year in Q4 2025 — its strongest pace in 13 quarters — making AWS roughly a $142 billion ARR business.
- Barclays says these new data points add “additional confidence around AWS upside from AI over coming years.”
The chip story most investors overlook
- Amazon’s custom chips (Trainium and Graviton) now generate about $20 billion in annual revenue.
- Barclays estimates that if Amazon monetized the chip business as a standalone offering to outside customers it “would be ~$50 billion” — a rarely cited valuation lens for AMZN.
- Trainium2 already powers most of Amazon’s Bedrock AI service, and Trainium3 promises ~40% better cost efficiency. Amazon expects nearly all Trainium3 supply to be committed by mid-2026.
GPU capacity that changes the scale
- Amazon plans to add more than 1 million NVIDIA GPUs across 2026–2027. Barclays estimates that level of capacity could support roughly $100 billion in annual AWS revenue — a scale-shifting figure that reframes AMZN’s upside.
Retail strength beyond cloud
- Amazon’s grocery business crossed $150 billion in U.S. gross sales in 2025, making it the country’s second-largest grocer.
- Jassy says everyday essentials now account for one in three units sold in the U.S., and customers who buy perishables shop with Amazon “twice as often as customers who don’t.” That frequency creates a retail moat that’s often underestimated.
Wall Street’s verdict
- Of 58 analysts covering AMZN, 49 rate it “Strong Buy,” six “Moderate Buy,” and three “Hold.”
- The mean price target is $286.66 (high target $360) versus a current price near $248.
- Longer-term forecasts expect adjusted EPS to rise from $7.17 in 2025 to $16.34 by 2030.
What this means for crypto and web3 audiences
- The GPU and cloud capacity ramp has direct implications for crypto-adjacent workloads: training large ML models, running zero-knowledge proof generation, blockchain analytics, and high-frequency trading strategies all demand massive, low-latency compute.
- A dominant AWS AI stack — combined with Amazon’s custom silicon and massive NVIDIA deployments — could attract more web3 projects to centralized cloud infrastructure even as the community debates decentralized compute alternatives.
- For token investors focused on infrastructure, the buildout signals growing centralized supply for compute-heavy services that many blockchain and AI-native projects rely on.
Bottom line: Barclays — and much of the Street — sees serious room to run for AMZN. The data from AWS, the chip business, GPU expansion, and retail fundamentals add up to a compelling bullish narrative heading into the rest of 2026.
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