Amazon Joins US Companies as 5th Member of the '2 Trillion Dollar Club'

Amazon reached a market capitalization of $2 trillion on the 26th (local time). It is the fifth U.S. company to join the '2 Trillion Dollar Club.'

On that day, Amazon closed the market at $193.61, up 3.9% from the previous day. Its market cap was $2.0148 trillion (approximately 2,803 trillion KRW). It is the fifth company to surpass $2 trillion, following Microsoft (MS), Apple, Nvidia, and Alphabet.

Amazon's stock price, which was $151.94 at the end of last year, has steadily risen this year, surging about 27%. It has jumped 52% over the past 12 months. Reaching a $2 trillion market cap took 30 years since its founding, and it has been 4 years and 5 months since it first surpassed a $1 trillion market cap in January 2020.

Wall Street analysts attribute Amazon's continued rise to its strength in cloud computing and artificial intelligence (AI).

In its Q1 earnings report released in April, Amazon announced that revenue from its core business unit AWS (Amazon Web Services) increased by 17%. This significantly exceeded Wall Street's forecast of 12%. Amazon holds about 40% of the global cloud market.

Amazon also invested $4 billion (approximately 5.5652 trillion KRW) in Anthropic, an AI startup considered a rival to ChatGPT developer OpenAI. Additionally, it unveiled its self-developed AI chip 'Trainium2' in November last year and introduced the AI chatbot 'Q,' strengthening its AI capabilities.

Dan Ives, a Wedbush technology analyst, said, "A large part of the valuation increase is due to cloud and AI," adding, "Amazon will be a major player in the AI revolution."

Besides the cloud sector, Amazon has shifted to a cost-cutting stance since 2022, reducing its workforce by more than 27,000 employees across various departments.

Neil Saunders, GlobalData retail director, analyzed that all these factors are boosting investor sentiment.

Bloomberg News evaluated, "Amazon's stock price has risen over the past year as the company restructures its business to cut costs and better leverage the AI boom," and "The core AWS business also showed signs of accelerating growth again."