Amazon's stock finally clinches a fresh record close

By Emily Bary

The company is edging closer to a $2 trillion market value after the stock notches its first new all-time high in almost three years

It's been almost three years since Amazon.com Inc.'s stock last fetched a record close, but shares finally broke through the barrier on Thursday.

Amazon shares (AMZN) finished the trading day up 1.7% at $189.05. That marked their first all-time closing high since July 8, 2021, when they ended at $186.57.

The stock had been especially close to record-close territory in recent days, having traded above $186.57 in intraday action on both April 8 and April 9 but failing to finish above the requisite level.

Amazon achieved a new record-high market capitalization on April 3. The company was able to see its valuation hit a new record before it saw its stock do so because its split-adjusted share count has increased since the prior market-value record.

Now Amazon is eying another milestone, as it edges closer to a $2 trillion market cap. The company ended with a $1.96 trillion valuation on Thursday.

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From a market-cap perspective, Amazon is nearly neck and neck with large technology peer Alphabet Inc. (GOOG) (GOOGL), which finished Thursday's session valued at $1.99 trillion. But from a stock perspective, Alphabet shares were earlier to the game as far as surpassing their 2021 record close, first doing so in January of this year before going on to achieve fresh highs on numerous occasions, including Thursday.

Amazon Chief Executive Andy Jassy talked up the company's opportunities in artificial intelligence in his annual shareholder letter that came out Thursday morning. Various Amazon services will "democratize this next seminal phase of AI" and help make it so that "much of this world-changing AI will be built on top of AWS," the company's cloud-computing platform, he said.

See also: Why Amazon CEO Andy Jassy says the company is especially suited to win in AI

Jefferies analyst Brent Thill commented that the letter "flexed their broadest collection of [Nvidia] instances of any provider and custom AI chips."

-Emily Bary

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04-11-24 1622ET

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