What Is Amazon Stock’s Biggest Opportunity?

Amazon.com (AMZN) generated $776 billion in sales over its last twelve months, giving the company a scale where most new ventures barely move the total. This size makes it difficult to see what could still lift the stock. Yet management said on its fiscal Q2 2026 call that the cloud business has more demand than it can serve. So what has Amazon already sold that it has not yet delivered?

Amazon Has $496 Billion Of Orders Still To Deliver

Amazon reported a backlog of $496 billion on that call, a figure management said had at least doubled from a year earlier. A backlog is the value of contracts customers have signed for work not yet done. As a made-up example, a five-year deal worth $10 billion translates into about $2 billion of revenue a year, and the part not yet delivered waits in the backlog.

That structure explains why contract length matters here. Management said most of Amazon’s AI capacity is now contracted for at least five-year terms, and that Anthropic and OpenAI, which it called the two leading AI labs, have made multi-year, multi-gigawatt commitments to Trainium, Amazon’s own chip. Management said Amazon’s capital spending in fiscal Q2 2026 went mainly to its cloud business, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and to generative AI.

Amazon cannot yet build fast enough to serve all of that demand. Management said the company will not have enough capacity to meet all its demand in 2026, and expects the same in 2027. The company plans to have double the power capacity by the end of 2027 that it had in 2025, an effort management said is on track. That means much of that backlog is revenue waiting on data centers Amazon is still building.

How Big Is AWS Against All Of Amazon?

AWS generated $129 billion in fiscal 2025, representing 18.0% of Amazon’s $717 billion in sales that year. While this is a smaller sum than the $426 billion for the North America segment, AWS grew faster that year, expanding by 19.7% against 10.0% for North America. Management said on the call that AWS now brings in revenue at a yearly pace of $169 billion.

The backlog alone equals about two-thirds of the sales the whole company made over the last twelve months. This is large even at Amazon’s size, though it will be delivered over several years. Management’s long-term view reaches much further: it believes AWS could very possibly become a trillion-dollar annual revenue business in time.

Amazon stock returned 22.4% over the past year through October 19, 2026, against 17.4% for the S&P 500. Yet on October 19 it closed 7.6% below its highest close of the past year, reached on August 3, 2026.

Can Amazon Build Fast Enough, And At What Cost?

Amazon must spend money first to deliver that backlog. Management now expects about $220 billion in cash CapEx in 2026, up from its earlier estimate of about $200 billion, because memory costs more. Amazon’s free cash flow, the cash left after that kind of spending, was negative $11.6 billion over its last twelve months, against positive $13.5 billion a year earlier. Amazon has also issued debt in 2026, with its total debt and lease liabilities standing at $223 billion at the end of June 2026, against $134 billion a year before.

The harder question is the price Amazon has already agreed to. Management said on the call that the prices in a signed deal hold for the length of that contract, and that new agreements take costs into account. With memory costing more and most AI capacity tied to long contracts, Amazon has less room on its older contracts if its costs keep rising.

Management has offered one sign that the demand will hold. When asked on the call whether data center spending could slow in 2027, management said the capacity it adds that year is largely reserved, and noted that quite a bit is already reserved for 2028. Amazon’s backlog is the number to watch in the report expected on or around October 29, 2026.

Does This Mean You Should Act On AMZN?

Our purpose is to inform you with unique data so you make the right investment decisions. That said, betting on a single stock is always risky, no matter which direction you choose.

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