It was not surprising that Amazon shares surged on Friday morning after the company’s “show me” quarter proved to be a “show of major force” from CEO Andy Jassy, according to CNBC’s Jim Cramer. Amazon reported third-quarter results Thursday evening that reignited investor enthusiasm in its cloud business, Amazon Web Services, the biggest in the world. The stock hit an all-time high of over $250 per share during Friday’s session. It must finish the day just above $242 to also make it a record-high close. Revenue from AWS – the company’s profit engine – surged 20% year over year to $33 billion, better than the 18% growth analysts had expected. It marked the first return to 20%-plus growth at AWS, since 2022, a milestone that seemed to put Jassy back on offense. “[Jassy] came in so hot,” Cramer said on ” Squawk on the Street ” on Friday after listening to the CEO on the company’s post-earnings call the night before. “If you go back to the last quarter, … he was pondering. It sounded like maybe he wasn’t sure of things. This time, he comes out of the tunnel, and he’s just jacked,” Cramer added, likening Jassy’s energy to that of an NFL star barreling out of the tunnel. AWS growth was the key that unlocked the stock’s surge, which brought its year-to-date advance to more than 12%. For months, investors have fretted that the company’s higher-margin cloud business was losing ground to No. 2 cloud Microsoft Azure and No. 3 Google. AMZN 1D mountain AMZN stock 1-day performance. Cramer believes Amazon’s Q3 performance put those concerns to rest. “This was a quarter where [Jassy] just said, ‘Listen bears, listen skeptics, we are doing so much better than everybody, including by the way Microsoft,” Cramer said. Later during Friday’s Morning Meeting for CNBC Investing Club members, Cramer said, “I do think that this company is back.” Megacap peers Google-parent Alphabet and Microsoft also reported earnings this week on Thursday and Wednesday evenings, respectively. Alphabet’s Google Cloud revenue increased 34% to $15.16 billion in the third quarter, while Azure recorded growth of 40%. Microsoft first started breaking out Azure revenue growth last quarter. While it doesn’t give quarterly revenue totals, it did reveal back in June that fiscal 2025 Azure revenue increased 34% year over year to $75 billion. While those competitors are growing faster on a percentage basis, AWS is expanding off a much larger revenue base. That means it’s easier for Google and Azure to post higher growth rates because they’re smaller and still catching up. Looking ahead, Jassy said AWS growth continues to show strong momentum. The company’s cloud backlog grew to $200 billion by the third quarter, not including several unannounced new deals in October that Jassy teased on the call. The more demand AWS sees, the more Amazon is investing to keep up with it and to maintain its cloud leadership. Amazon’s total capital expenditures so far in 2025 were $89.9 billion. Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky expects full-year capex to be about $125 billion in 2025 and anticipates that it will increase again in 2026. Higher spending in the AI race in the next fiscal year has weighed on other megacap peers such as Meta Platforms and Microsoft this week, over worries it could squeeze company profits. Yet Amazon’s stock surge suggests increased spending is positioning AWS for continued growth to ensure it has the capacity to keep winning future AI workloads. We continue to maintain our buy-equivalent 1-rating on Amazon stock along with our price target of $275, which we raised from $250 on Thursday evening. ( Jim Cramer’s Charitable Trust, the portfolio used by the Club, owns Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta. See here for a full list of the stocks.)
