Amazon Stock Lags as AI Threat Looms, Analysts See Upside

Amazon ( (AMZN) ) has been popular among investors this week. Here is a recap of the key news on this stock.

Amazon’s share price has gained just 6% year-to-date, lagging the broader market and its mega-cap tech peers as investors worry about tariffs on its retail arm, heavy capital spending, and fierce cloud competition from Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. Yet Wall Street remains firmly bullish: backed by a strong third-quarter beat and 20% growth in Amazon Web Services, analysts see the company’s dominant e-commerce position, AI-driven AWS roadmap, and fast-growing advertising business as key engines for earnings expansion into 2026. The stock carries a Strong Buy consensus from 44 Buys and one Hold, with an average target of about $296 per share, implying roughly 27% upside from current levels.

Ownership data underline how widely held Amazon has become. Public companies and individual investors control about 38% of the stock, followed by mutual funds, ETFs, other institutions, and insiders. Founder Jeff Bezos remains the largest single shareholder, though his stake has dipped below 10% after recent sales, while Vanguard is the top institutional holder at 6.72%. At the same time, Amazon is confronting a strategic threat from AI shopping agents such as those built on ChatGPT, which could siphon off traffic, compress margins, and weaken customer loyalty. The company has moved to block scraping bots and has sued AI players like Perplexity, even as it experiments with its own agent-friendly tools on smaller platforms. With analysts expecting nearly half of U.S. shoppers to use AI agents by 2030, how Amazon navigates this shift could be a major catalyst—or risk—for shareholders in the coming years.