Nine American companies are valued at $1 trillion or more, and four of them have graduated into the ultra-exclusive $3 trillion club:
- Nvidia: $4.55 trillion.
- Apple: 3.95 trillion.
- Microsoft: $3.69 trillion.
- Alphabet: $3.37 trillion.
I think Amazon (AMZN +0.56%) could join them as early as next year. Revenue growth at the company's industry-leading cloud business just accelerated in the third quarter of 2025 (ended Sept. 30) thanks to artificial intelligence (AI), while efficiency continued to improve in its enormous e-commerce segment.
Amazon has a market capitalization of $2.6 trillion as I write this, so the $3 trillion milestone could be a mere formality if the company maintains its current momentum. Read on.
Image source: Amazon.
Amazon Web Services' revenue growth just reaccelerated
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world's largest cloud computing platform. It offers hundreds of tools to help businesses thrive in the digital age, including an expanding portfolio of solutions designed to help them deploy AI.
Like most cloud providers, AWS operates data centers fitted with Nvidia's advanced graphics processing units (GPUs), which are the gold standard for AI development. However, Amazon also designs its own chips in-house, like the Trainium2, which can reduce AI training costs by up to 40%. Trainium2 is now a multibillion-dollar product, and it grew by 150% sequentially during the third quarter (compared to the second quarter).
Anthropic, a leading start-up that competes with OpenAI, is training its latest Claude AI models on 500,000 Trainium2 chips, with plans to expand to 1 million before this year is over. If more developers adopt Trainium chips through AWS, the cloud platform could see expanding profit margins because they are much cheaper to deploy than the pricey GPUs supplied by third parties like Nvidia.
Overall, AWS generated a record $33 billion in revenue during the third quarter, which was up 20% year over year. It marked an acceleration from the 17% increase in the second quarter, and it was actually the fastest growth in almost three years (since the fourth quarter of 2022).
The company is on track to spend $125 billion on AI data center infrastructure in 2025, and CEO Andy Jassy says customers have been soaking up the computing capacity as soon as it comes online. In fact, AWS had an order backlog worth $200 billion at the end of the third quarter from customers that are waiting for more data center capacity, so the cloud platform's momentum is unlikely to slow anytime soon.
Amazon's earnings are soaring
AWS accounted for just 18% of Amazon's total revenue of $180 billion in the third quarter, but it was responsible for 65% of the company's operating income. In other words, the cloud platform is the profitability engine behind the entire organization. E-commerce remains its single largest source of revenue, but it typically runs on razor-thin profit margins because amazon.com aims to provide customers with the lowest possible prices.
The company is working hard to improve margins by boosting efficiency. In 2023, it broke its U.S. logistics network into eight regions, and the products stored in its fulfillment centers are now specific to each geographic area based on their popularity. This means orders travel shorter distances to reach customers, which lowers costs.
NASDAQ: AMZN
Key Data Points
Amazon also uses over 1 million robots across its fulfillment network to improve productivity, and the company expects that number to grow. These AI-powered machines can retrieve inventory, move products across fulfillment centers, and even pack orders. Since they don't need breaks or days off, they are powerful tools in the quest to improve profit margins.
The efficiency measures across the e-commerce business, combined with the strength in AWS, drove Amazon's earnings to $1.95 per share in the third quarter, which was up 36% from the year-ago period. The result crushed Wall Street's earnings estimate of $1.57 per share, which has become a trend -- the company has now topped analysts' expectations in every quarter of 2025 so far.
Amazon has a mathematical path to the $3 trillion club
Based on Amazon's trailing-12-month earnings of $7.08 per share, its stock is trading at a price-to-earnings ratio (P/E) of 35.1. Since the Nasdaq-100 index trades at a P/E of 34.7, you could argue that the stock is fairly valued relative to its big-tech peers.
However, Wall Street's consensus estimate (provided by Yahoo! Finance) suggests its earnings could grow to $7.81 per share in 2026, placing its stock at a forward P/E of 31.8. That means the stock would have to climb by around 10.3% by the end of next year just to maintain its current P/E of 35.1, which would take its market cap to $2.93 trillion.
Keep in mind that Amazon has made a habit of blowing Wall Street's estimates out of the water, so even a small beat next year could push the company into the ultra-exclusive $3 trillion club.
