Amazon.com, Inc.

Amazon.com, Inc. is an American multinational technology company that operates the world's largest e-commerce marketplace, the leading public cloud infrastructure platform (Amazon Web Services), and a top-three global digital advertising business, generating $716.9 billion in revenue in fiscal 2025. Founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994 as an online bookstore, Amazon now employs approximately 1,576,000 people and serves consumers, enterprises, and governments across more than 200 countries.

This is a file about a company in the middle of its second great infrastructure build-out. The first, from roughly 2010 to 2018, funded the data-centre footprint that made AWS the dominant cloud platform and produced one of the best capital-allocation decisions in corporate history. The second, now underway, is bigger: roughly $132 billion in FY2025 capital expenditure and an estimated $200 billion in 2026, overwhelmingly directed at AI infrastructure — chips, data centres, networking gear, and power. The debate is whether this is the first-AWS-wave pattern repeating at larger scale, or a capex cycle that outruns monetisation. The file turns on that question, and on whether the sum of Amazon's parts — the fast-growing advertising business, the quietly enormous grocery operation, the emerging satellite broadband unit, the custom silicon franchise — collectively justify the multiple the market already assigns.

Amazon is not a single-business story and never has been. Its economic centre of gravity has shifted repeatedly: from first-party retail to marketplace, from marketplace to AWS, from AWS-plus-retail to AWS-plus-advertising. The next shift — toward AI infrastructure as the primary profit engine, with advertising and logistics as secondary compounders — is the one the current stock price is beginning to discount. Whether it discounts too much or too little is what the analysis that follows works through.