Amazon has crossed the $2 trillion market cap threshold for the first time amid its push into artificial intelligence.
The company’s shares were up around 4% to about $194 during mid-day trading on Wednesday, pushing its market value to $2.02 trillion. It joins Google-parent Alphabet in the $2 trillion market cap club. Alphabet crossed the $2 trillion threshold in April. Meanwhile, Microsoft, Apple, and Nvidia remain the top three most valuable public companies in the world.
Amazon’s shares have climbed almost 30% so far this year. In April, the company’s Amazon Web Services division reported 17% sales growth year-over-year to $25 billion in the first quarter.
“Our AWS customers are excited about leveraging generative AI to change their customer experiences and businesses,” Amazon chief executive Andy Jassy said during the company’s earnings call. “We see considerable momentum on the AI front.”
In March, Amazon completed its largest investment in an outside company ever with an additional $2.75 billion investment in AI startup Anthropic. It initially invested $1.25 billion in the startup in September. Anthropic uses AWS as its primary cloud provider for AI safety research and model development. Amazon has also said Anthropic will use AWS’s AI chips, Trainium and Inferentia, “to build, train, and deploy its future models.”
Jassy said in an annual letter to shareholders in April he is optimistic much of the generative AI transformation will be built on AWS.
“Generative AI may be the largest technology transformation since the cloud (which itself, is still in the early stages), and perhaps since the Internet,” Jassy wrote. “There has never been a time in Amazon’s history where we’ve felt there is so much opportunity to make our customers’ lives better and easier.”
Amazon is reportedly working on an AI chatbot, internally called “Metis,” to rival OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The chatbot will be accessible through a web browser and will be powered by one of the company’s internal AI models, Olympus, Business Insider reported, citing unnamed people familiar with the matter and an internal document.