Skip to navigationSkip to main contentSkip to right columnADVERTISEMENTDaniel Sparks, The Motley FoolTue, August 4, 2026 at 5:46 PM GMT+2 5 min readAmazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) closed at $284.02 on Monday, up more than 4% for the day and at a record high. That price values the e-commerce and cloud computing giant just above $3 trillion -- a level it had never reached before. Getting from here to a $4 trillion valuation takes about a 31% gain -- a stock price around $371.Amazon wouldn't be the first to arrive. Nvidia is already worth about $5 trillion, and Alphabet sits at about $4.6 trillion.Missed Nvidia in 2009? This Rare Signal Is Flashing Again. In 2009, a "Double Down" signal flashed for a little-known chipmaker called Nvidia. For the first time in years, that same "Total Conviction" signal is flashing for a company 1/100th the size of Nvidia. Continue »The rest of the climb would likely be driven by the same catalyst that propelled it to $3 trillion: profit growth. And I think the current pace covers the distance with room to spare.Image source: Amazon.Monday's record came after last week's second-quarter report gave investors plenty to like. Net sales rose 20% year over year to $200.6 billion. Operating income climbed 43% to $27.5 billion, up from $19.2 billion a year earlier.And growth wasn't confined to the cloud. North America sales rose 16% year over year, international sales rose 15%, and advertising revenue grew 26% year over year.But Amazon Web Services (AWS) was the standout. The cloud computing segment grew sales 37% year over year to $42.2 billion in the second quarter, its fastest rate in 18 quarters, and its operating income rose about 63% to $16.6 billion.The segment's economics explain why it matters so much. For every dollar of sales AWS booked in the quarter, it earned about $0.39 of operating income. The rest of Amazon earned about $0.07.Reported net income looked even bigger ($62.6 billion, or $5.75 per share), but investors should be careful with that figure. It includes $53.4 billion of non-operating income, mostly from marking up the value of Amazon's investments in artificial intelligence (AI) developer Anthropic. That's an accounting gain, not money the stores or the cloud earned. Operating income is the sturdier yardstick.Demand doesn't appear to be the constraint, either. CEO Andy Jassy said on the earnings call that Amazon now plans about $220 billion of capital spending this year, up from the $200 billion it projected in February. And he said even that amount won't buy enough capacity to meet all the demand the company already has for 2026, a dynamic he believes will hold in 2027 as well.Terms and Privacy PolicyEU DSA contactPrivacy & Cookie SettingsMore Info