Amazon Falls as $53.4 Billion AI Gain Faces Scrutiny

This article first appeared on GuruFocus.

Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN), the e-commerce, advertising and cloud-computing giant, fell approximately 2.1% to $260.34 Thursday morning as rising Treasury yields slammed another brake on expensive growth stocks. The price in the chart puts Amazon below the earlier $261.39 quote and roughly 2.1% beneath Wednesday’s $265.84 close. But the bigger story is buried inside Amazon’s monster second-quarter profit: AI investments gave the numbers an enormous boost that investors cannot simply treat as another quarter of operating growth.

Amazon booked roughly $53.4 billion of pretax non-operating income, primarily tied to its Anthropic investment, according to Reuters. Strip away that eye-popping investment effect and the underlying Amazon engine is still roaring. Quarterly sales jumped 20% to $200.6 billion, operating income reached $27.5 billion and Amazon Web Services revenue surged 37% to $42.2 billion. That AWS number…