Amazon.com Inc. surpassed $2 trillion in market value for the first time in afternoon trading on Wednesday.
The push higher for Amazon’s stock market valuation comes a little more than a week after Nvidia hit $3 trillion and briefly became the most valuable company on Wall Street. Nvidia's chips are used to power many AI applications and its valuation has soared as a result. Amazon has also been making big investments in AI as global interest has grown in the technology. Most of the company’s focus has been on business-focused products, including AI models and a chatbot called Q, which Amazon makes available to businesses that use its cloud computing unit AWS.
In April, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said that AI capabilities have reaccelerated AWS’ growth and that it was on pace for $100 billion in annual revenue. The unit had slowed down in growth last year as companies cut down on costs amid high inflation. The tech giant has also invested $4 billion in the San Francisco-based AI company Anthropic to develop so-called foundation models that underpin generative AI systems. Amazon also makes and designs its own AI chips.