NEW YORK — Amazon.com stock outperformed the broader Wall Street selloff on September 8, falling just 0.66% as investors navigated a commodity-market shock, renewed tariff tensions, and a landmark artificial intelligence chip deal that gave Amazon shares one of the session’s few positive catalysts.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell more than 628 points — its worst single-session drop since April — as Brent crude surged toward $99 a barrel following Houthi drone strikes on Saudi Aramco’s Jizan refinery complex, and Canada’s retaliatory tariffs on $20 billion in U.S. goods took effect. Amazon’s shares closed at $256.81, down $1.70 from Friday’s $258.51, trading between $255.29 and $261.12 on volume of 30.75 million shares.
The counterweight emerged Monday morning when Qualcomm and Amazon Web Services announced a multi-generational partnership that could see Amazon purchase as much as $60 billion in Qualcomm AI inference chips and networking silicon through September 2036. Qualcomm also granted Amazon warrants to acquire 25 million shares at $161.26 each, a package worth about $4 billion at current prices, with 3.75 million shares vesting immediately and the remaining 85% dependent on AWS meeting spending milestones over the next decade.
Qualcomm shares jumped more than 9.5% after the announcement, marking the chipmaker’s largest one-day gain in years. For Amazon stock, the agreement underscores a strategic effort to diversify AWS’s AI chip supply beyond Nvidia, the leading inference-chip provider to hyperscale cloud companies, while securing a multi-year pricing framework with a second supplier whose technology roadmap is now closely tied to Amazon Web Services’ long-term purchasing commitments.
The Amazon-Qualcomm partnership centers on AI inference workloads and optical connectivity technology capable of scaling to 1.6 terabits per second. Whether AWS ultimately spends close to the full $60 billion commitment remains uncertain, and the warrant structure reflects that uncertainty: 85% of Qualcomm’s potential financial benefit vests only if Amazon reaches actual chip and networking-silicon purchase thresholds, rather than merely because the deal was announced.
Amazon’s Q2 2026 earnings results provided the financial backdrop for both the Qualcomm agreement and Amazon stock’s relative resilience. Amazon reported revenue of $200.6 billion, up 20% from a year earlier and above the $196.16 billion Wall Street consensus, while AWS delivered its fastest growth in 18 quarters, with revenue up 36.7% year over year to $22 billion. AWS also reported a cumulative forward backlog of $364 billion, excluding the separate commitment associated with Amazon’s investment in Anthropic.
Amazon reported Q2 2026 earnings per share of $5.75, compared with analyst expectations of $1.82, although the headline result included a $53.4 billion non-cash gain related to the increased value of Amazon’s Anthropic stake. Excluding that gain, Amazon’s operating performance remained strong, but the wide difference between reported EPS and normalized operating earnings remains important for investors assessing Amazon’s valuation.
Amazon management has raised 2026 capital expenditure guidance to $220 billion from $200 billion, with nearly all of the additional spending directed toward AI data centers, cloud capacity, and infrastructure. Trailing 12-month free cash flow declined 69% as the AI capex cycle absorbed operating-income gains, while Amazon raised tens of billions of dollars in debt to finance the expansion. The financing strategy reflects management’s view that the window to build AI infrastructure is limited and that delaying investment could create a greater long-term cost than using leverage early.
Amazon’s AI infrastructure expansion is taking place alongside ongoing workforce reductions. The company eliminated about 16,000 corporate positions in January 2026 and cut an unspecified number of artificial general intelligence roles in July, reflecting a broader Big Tech trend in which spending on AI infrastructure rises while administrative and middle-management layers are reduced.
Amazon’s Q3 2026 revenue guidance of $197 billion to $202 billion, representing year-over-year growth of 9% to 12%, points to a slowdown from the 20% growth reported in Q2. The outlook suggests Amazon expects its next significant acceleration in revenue growth to come from Q4 holiday-season demand rather than the third quarter.
The stock’s relative outperformance on Monday — down 0.66% against a market that lost more than 1% across major indices — reflects the divergence AWS’s growth acceleration has opened since Q2 results. Alphabet fell 1.18% on the same session, its company-specific antitrust tailwind overwhelmed by the macro selloff. Amazon’s Qualcomm announcement provided a buffer that a legal ruling six days in the past could not.
Amazon.com Inc. trades on the Nasdaq under the ticker AMZN. The stock closed Monday at $256.81, down $1.70 from its Friday close of $258.51.
