Amazon’s market valuation topped $2 trillion for the first time Wednesday (June 26), driven in part by investor interest in artificial intelligence (AI).
The company became the fifth U.S. firm to reach that milestone, with the others being Microsoft, Apple, Nvidia and Alphabet, Reuters reported Wednesday.
Together with investor optimism about AI, the resilience of the U.S. economy and the possibility of lower interest rates have contributed to rising U.S. stock indexes thus far in 2024, according to the report.
In the case of Amazon, the firm’s shares have risen 26% since the beginning of the year, the report said.
The company’s involvement in the field of AI includes Amazon Web Services (AWS), which is the world’s largest provider of cloud services, and investments in AI startup Anthropic and robotics firm Figure, per the release.
The AI boom has driven a race between Nvidia, Microsoft and Apple to hold the title of the world’s most valuable company, with the three companies changing positions over the past month.
At one point, on June 18, Nvidia took the lead as its market capitalization reached about $3.3 trillion. Nvidia’s gains have been driven by its status as the dominant maker of chips that help power data centers that run the computing tasks needed by AI applications.
About a week earlier, on June 12, Apple took the title of “World’s Most Valuable Company” with a market capitalization of $3.38 trillion. Apple’s stock had begun to climb as it began that week with its annual developers conference, at which it rolled out a series of AI features for its devices.
As for Amazon, it was reported Monday (June 24) that the firm is developing its own AI chatbot to compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The chatbot provides text-based and image-based answers in a smart, conversational fashion, and can share links to the source of its responses, offer follow-up questions and generate images.
On June 13, it was reported that Amazon is investing $230 million in AWS credits in AI startups. These credits will give early-stage generative AI firms free access to computing power, a variety of AI models and infrastructure, provided they build their companies using AWS.