Amazon Stock Rises on Accelerating AWS Growth and Committed Cloud Contracts

Amazon's stock has returned 8.9% over the past twelve months and is currently trading about 13% below its 52-week high.

The company's cloud arm, AWS, experienced accelerated growth in Q2 2026, with a year-over-year increase of 36.7%, up from 28% in Q1 2026.

Management attributes this acceleration to the increasing use of Amazon's Graviton processor, which is now used by 98% of AWS's top 1,000 EC2 customers, as well as the aggregation of leading foundation models and custom Trainium silicon.

The backlog of committed cloud contracts stood at $496 billion in Q2 2026, growing at triple-digit rates year over year. Management notes that even the capacity being built cannot meet all the demand for 2026, with a significant portion of 2027 and 2028 capacity already reserved.