Amazon has released a lot of news this week, from advances in its cloud business to questions about its partnership with the U.S. Postal Service, giving investors a lot to understand. At the end of a difficult year, headlines make headlines. The e-commerce and cloud giant’s stock is up 4.6%, compared with 16.4% for the broader S&P 500 index, and far ahead of peer Magnificent Seven. Even though the company has shown renewed growth on AWS and consolidation of its dominant Prime e-commerce ecosystem, investors remain concerned that the company is losing ground in the AI race and could face margin pressure from tariffs. We believe the company has turned a corner. “We see a better year ahead as management continues to demonstrate its AI strategy and expand operating margins,” Jeff Marks, Portfolio Director at Club, said in a report Thursday, highlighting stocks poised for a 2026 recovery. Here’s how this week’s news fits into that investment theme: Positive updates at cloud events News: At Amazon’s annual re:Invent 2025 conference in Las Vegas, Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman announced Trainium3, the latest version of the company’s in-house custom chip. Delivers 4x more computing performance, energy efficiency, and memory bandwidth than previous generations. AWS also announced that it is already working on Trainium4. The company also unveiled a suite of cloud products, including advanced AI-driven platforms and agents to help customers automate their workloads. Our Take: We’re glad to hear that AWS continues to innovate its chip products to diversify its reliance on Nvidia, the industry leader in graphics processing units (GPUs). But most of the investor attention is on bringing data center capacity online. Amazon needs to buy more Nvidia chips to catch up in the AI space. Jim Cramer also interviewed AWS CEO Matt Garman on Mad Money earlier this week, and he was optimistic about the future growth of the cloud business. Relationship with USPS to be tested News: The Washington Post reports that Amazon may sever ties with USPS when its contract expires in October 2026. Amazon likely considered the move because it already operates Amazon Logistics, a shadow postal service that handles billions of packages a year. By removing the USPS as an intermediary, Amazon will have complete financial and operational control. Amazon refuted the report. Our take: The e-commerce and cloud giant has invested billions of dollars over the years to build a vast logistics network and now delivers more packages in the United States than UPS or FedEx. We still use USPS to ship small and light packages, especially packages from third-party Amazon sellers. USPS also helps with “last mile delivery” in difficult-to-reach geographic areas. If the company eliminates the post office as an intermediary, it could further reduce service costs and improve profit margins. Possible IPO payday News: Anthropic, the AI startup that created the Claude chatbot, is reportedly in talks to launch one of the biggest IPOs in history in early 2026, according to the Financial Times. Anthropic, by contrast, has no immediate IPO plans and is instead “keeping its options open,” Anthropic chief communications officer Sasha de Marigny said Thursday at an Axios event in New York City. Our take: Anthropic’s initial public offering could be a huge reward for Amazon, which has invested about $8 billion in Anthropic. As part of that investment, Anthropic has partnered with AWS as its primary cloud provider and training partner to run large-scale AI training and inference workloads. Anthropic IPO will elevate the AI startup’s standing and thereby strengthen AWS’s dominance as a best-in-class cloud provider. Super-Fast Grocery Delivery News: Amazon announced that it is testing a super-fast delivery service starting in Seattle and Philadelphia that can deliver fresh groceries, household goods, and popular items in as little as 30 minutes. Amazon Prime members get discounted shipping starting at $3.99 per order, while non-Prime members pay $13.99. Club’s take: Amazon continues to expand its online grocery and essentials sales as more customers shop for everyday items at the online retailer. While the retail business has low margins, Amazon operates with an eye toward lowering the cost of serving, which should help improve margins over time. Amazon is already the second-largest U.S. retailer in terms of online grocery sales, behind Walmart. As Amazon continues to move forward in the industry, it should be able to take advantage of this significant growth opportunity, especially as it leverages advanced AI capabilities for optimal inventory placement and demand forecasting. (The Jim Cramer Charitable Trust is long AMZN, NVDA. See here for a complete list of stocks.) As a subscriber to Jim Cramer’s CNBC Investment Club, you will receive trade alerts before Jim makes a trade. After Jim sends a trade alert, he waits 45 minutes before buying or selling stocks in his charitable trust’s portfolio. If Jim talks about a stock on CNBC TV, he will issue a trade alert and then wait 72 hours before executing the trade. The above investment club information is subject to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy, along with our disclaimer. No fiduciary duties or obligations exist or arise from your receipt of information provided in connection with the Investment Club. No specific results or benefits are guaranteed.
