Amazon reached a valuation of US$3 trillion for the first time on Monday, rising for a second straight session after last week's strong earnings report.

Shares of the tech giant were up 5.2 percent at US$285.75 in early trading, lifting the company's valuation to about US$3.1 trillion.

Amazon posted quarterly profits of more than US$62 billion thanks to huge increases in two artificial intelligence-related divisions: AI cloud business and chips.

The company's cloud business, Amazon Web Services, posted a 37 percent jump in revenue to reach US$42.2 billion, prompting CEO Andy Jassy last week to predict it could be a "trillion-dollar annual revenue business for us in time."

Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet and Meta are collectively on track to pour around US$700 billion into AI data centres, chips and computing infrastructure this year.

Giovanni Mazzariello, equity specialist at UniCredit, described last week's results from Amazon and other AI "hyper scalers" as "broadly reassuring."

"Taken together, rapid revenue growth, widening margins and a swelling backlog from all four hyper scalers, provide the clearest evidence that utilisation and monetisation are rising fast enough to absorb the growing depreciation and operating costs of the infrastructure build-out," Mazzariello said. (AFP)



Edited by Tony Sabine