Amazon Could Be Worth US$3 Trillion in Three Years, Analyst Says

In a research note on Tuesday, Jefferies analyst Brent Thill lays out a case that Amazon (Ticker: AMZN) can reach US$5,700 a share over the next three years, a potential 70% gain that would boost the company’s valuation to nearly US$3 trillion.

Thill, who maintains a Buy rating on Amazon shares with a current price target of $4,000, notes that the stock has been stuck in neutral since last August, but thinks the stock will outperform again when the market gets clarity on the direction of the core retail business. He cautions that overall revenue growth will be a key driver of stock performance and that the shares could be range-bound until moving past what he warns will be a tough June quarter comparison. But for the long haul, he’s all in.

The analyst asserts that Amazon Web Services is the company’s most valuable business, and one that is well-positioned for further strong growth. He thinks AWS could be worth $1.2 trillion in three years, as more corporate computing workloads shift to the cloud. (Barron’s notes there are only four companies with market caps higher than that: Amazon itself, Apple, Microsoft and Alphabet.)

In a finding that could surprise some investors, Thill thinks the company’s advertising business could be worth more than $600 billion in three years. “As Amazon becomes an increasingly important channel for [consumer-packaged goods] companies, we believe a portion of their spending will shift toward search and product placement,” he writes. “In addition, we think Amazon has the opportunity to expand advertising further in international and new channels like Prime Video.”

As for the core retail business, the analyst estimates the value three years out at US$1 trillion, about US$700 billion of that for the third-party seller business. “[Amazon] Prime adoption and a broader shift to e-commerce have driven an acceleration in growth,” he writes. “We believe the length of the pandemic has served to engrain consumers’ increased reliance on e-commerce.”

Thill is careful to say that his sum-of-the-parts analysis is simply illustrative and doesn’t reflect his official price target. But he adds that viewing Amazon over a longer time period “helps provide perspective in the face of near-term disruptions/volatility from the pandemic.” He also thinks Amazon’s discount to its underlying asset value can narrow over time. And Thill points out that he is not including any value for its new healthcare business, which he notes is addressing a $350 billion U.S. market.

Amazon closed Tuesday at US$3,399.92, up 0.6%.

Chip makers are fighting to assure investors that the artificial-intelligence boom is racing forward. Wall Street might not believe it until Nvidia’s NVDA -0.98%decrease; down pointing triangle Jensen Huang says so.

When Huang steps up to the mic for his company’s earnings call Wednesday, he will have the world’s attention. What he says about Nvidia’s present will preview the future of AI, dictate the path forward for a tech-crazed stock market and influence an American economy increasingly tethered to hopes that the boom won’t go bust.

The $5 trillion chip maker has provided the key building blocks for AI since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022 set off a race for dominance among OpenAI, Anthropic and established Silicon Valley giants. Now, as Nvidia backstops sprawling data-center projects and an exotic money pipeline to boost chip demand, the company’s influence is arguably bigger than ever.

But there are signs of trouble ahead. Political pushback to AI is growing. A bond selloff propelled borrowing costs to their highest levels in years. The hyperscalers that include some of Nvidia’s key customers—once cash-printing machines—are relying more on debt. OpenAI recently told investors its revenue rose by a tepid 18% in the second quarter while its losses deepened.

Nvidia is increasingly stepping in to shore up potential weak points across the market. Earlier this month, the company teamed up with six of Wall Street’s biggest firms on a $500 billion AI-financing plan, pledging to backstop lending to customers that can’t afford its chips otherwise. The chip maker last week also took a stake in Cloverleaf Infrastructure, which arranges power for data centers, and struck a $6 billion deal with startup Poolside aimed at developing a powerful open-weight AI model.

After watching shares in other chip makers and the so-called Magnificent Seven tech companies swing wildly in recent months, Wall Street is hoping Nvidia can beat expectations—again. The countdown is on.

“It’s kind of becoming more and more like the World Cup final than the Super Bowl at this point,” said Brian Mulberry, chief market strategist at Zacks Investment Management. “It’s just gotten to be that big.”

The company has smashed analysts’ earnings estimates for each of the 14 quarters since the AI boom kicked into high gear. Nvidia posted 210% annual growth in net income in its last three-month period, according to FactSet, making Wall Street’s 126% projection look pedestrian.

Expectations for a blowout second quarter have risen rapidly over the course of this year. All Nvidia will have to do to beat this target: outrun 95% annual earnings growth to more than $51.5 billion. Analysts project the chip maker will report record sales of $92 billion for the period, up from a forecast of $78 billion at the start of this year.

In July, big-tech earnings sparked volatility. Concerns about runaway capital spending spread across the sector after Alphabet’s and Tesla’s results, driving a $890 billion wipeout that contributed to the unwind of hedge fund Situational Awareness. Microsoft posted the largest one-day gain in market capitalization by any company, ever, after a quarter proving that it could still show investors the money. SpaceX rocketed higher after a record-breaking initial public offering, only to see $1 trillion in value evaporate.

Surging memory prices and borrowing costs have fueled fears that those and other companies will be unable to keep plowing more money into supplies including Nvidia chips. Shaia Hosseinzadeh, founder of OnyxPoint Global Management, has recently bought dips in AI-infrastructure stocks when Wall Street has strained to absorb massive debt issued by Silicon Valley.

“The macro data is really quite robust,” he said. “Of course, there’s a level at which everything breaks.”

Investors have kept pumping money into the AI trade despite concerns around chip consumers—and to the benefit of chip producers. That is why Nvidia’s outlook for semiconductor demand could send ripples through counterparts such as Micron Technology and Sandisk, developers of the data centers in which their chips reside, and a supply chain of power producers, contractors and other specialists that underpin the globe-spanning AI build-out.

“We joke internally that we’re all Nvidia analysts now,” said David Lefkowitz, head of U.S. equities at UBS Global Wealth Management.

The irony is that investors have tended to sell Nvidia stock immediately after blockbuster earnings, with shares falling each trading session after its four past quarterly reports. Some are betting that will be the case this time around, too.

The options market is pricing in a 5.3% swing, higher or lower, in Nvidia shares during the session following earnings, according to Option Research & Technology Services. That is higher than the 4.8% average move in Nvidia’s stock over the last 12 months after the company reports quarterly results.

In recent days, some of the most actively traded Nvidia options have been put contracts tied to the stock falling from its Friday value of $214.75 to $205 and $210 apiece, according to Cboe Global Markets data. Put options give the right to sell a stock by a set price and typically represent a bearish wager.

Many analysts remain optimistic. Frank Lee, global head of tech hardware and semiconductor research at HSBC Global Investment Research, recently raised his price target for Nvidia shares to $360 from $325, citing, among other things, Nvidia’s strategic partnerships with suppliers and its role as a top contributor to open-source AI.

Amazon Could Be Worth US$3 Trillion in Three Years, Analyst Says

Amazon is going to get bigger—maybe a lot bigger.

Nvidia’s earnings will test Wall Street’s confidence in the AI boom.