By Christine Ji
The company’s AWS division is facing new threats from Microsoft and Google, leaving investors wondering if Amazon is falling behind in the AI race
Amazon shares have remained essentially flat in 2025 as investors question the trajectory of its AWS business.
The “Magnificent Seven” has been the dominant force in markets this year, but at least one of its members didn’t get the memo.
On Tuesday, Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) became the worst-performing Magnificent Seven stock year-to-date. The position was previously occupied by Apple Inc. (AAPL), but a surge of increased investor confidence on the back of robust iPhone sales sent that stock into positive territory for the year yesterday, and it crossed ahead of Amazon’s on Tuesday.
Shares of Amazon have returned just 0.6% so far this year, largely due to investor concerns about the company’s Amazon Web Services business and its artificial-intelligence strategy.
Investors have expressed frustration with Amazon’s lack of a clear AI roadmap, Mizuho desk-based analyst Jordan Klein told MarketWatch recently.
In July, Amazon’s second-quarter earnings report showed a 17.5% growth rate for AWS, which only matched investor expectations instead of beating them. In contrast, Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) saw its cloud business grow 39% and Alphabet Inc. (GOOGL) (GOOG) saw its cloud business grow 32% in the quarter ending July 2025. Both of those rates exceeded analyst expectations.
Beyond the lackluster results, Amazon Chief Executive Andy Jassy failed to provide specific AWS guidance on the most recent earnings call, leaving investors uncertain about exactly what was going on with the business.
Amazon’s underperformance isn’t just unique to 2025, though. Over the last five years, the stock has lagged behind its Big Tech peers and the S&P 500 SPX, returning 43% compared with 102% for the broader index. On an annualized basis, Amazon and the S&P 500 have returned 7.4% and 15.1%, respectively, according to Dow Jones Market Data.
Also read: Amazon’s stock is a top pick at Morgan Stanley. Here’s a $600 billion reason why.
AWS remains the largest cloud-computing provider by market share, followed by Microsoft’s Azure and Google Cloud. However, Richard Windsor, founder of the research firm Radio Free Mobile, believes that AWS’s dominant position is facing challenges, especially from Azure.
Microsoft’s cloud-computing business has received a large boost from the company’s exclusive partnership with OpenAI, Windsor told MarketWatch, and should remain in a good spot to capitalize on incremental demand from AI inferencing needs.
For the fiscal year ending July 2025, Azure generated roughly $75 billion in revenue. In comparison, Amazon announced in its second-quarter earnings call that AWS had achieved an annualized revenue run rate of roughly $123 billion.
“There were days when AWS was orders of magnitude larger than Azure, and those days are gone,” Windsor said. “It’s not inconceivable that if Amazon continues to languish like this, and Azure continues to grow much quicker than it, at some point it overtakes Amazon.”
The biggest constraints to AWS growth are access to power, “constraints off and on with chips, and then some of the components to make the servers,” Jassy said on last quarter’s earnings call.
Amazon’s third-quarter earnings report will provide an opportunity for the company to change the narrative. A reacceleration in AWS growth toward 20% would be a key step in assuaging investor concerns, according to Klein. However, investors might not find a definitive answer; according to Jassy, it could “take several quarters” to resolve AWS constraints.
For now, investors remain in “wait-and-see mode,” Klein told MarketWatch.
Representatives from Amazon did not immediately return a request for comment.
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-Christine Ji
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09-23-25 1640ET
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