By Kit Norton
Amazon.com shares have been on a hot streak ahead of first-quarter earnings and were trending toward a record closing high on Friday. One analyst sees even more upside with revenue from cloud-computing unit Amazon Web Services (AWS) set to accelerate.
Truist analyst Youssef Squali on Friday raised his Amazon stock price target to $285 from $280 and maintained a Buy rating on the shares. The new price target currently represents 12% upside.
Squali wrote that Amazon's first-quarter results on April 29 should show sales acceleration at AWS along with above-industry growth across e-commerce and digital advertising.
Wall Street consensus calls for Amazon first-quarter earnings of $1.63 a share, compared with $1.59 a share a year ago, with total revenue growing 14% to $177.17 billion, according to FactSet.
Squali expects AWS revenue growth of 25% in the first quarter, compared with 23% in the fourth quarter, based on accelerated adoption in artificial intelligence workloads from a growing number of partnerships, including OpenAI and Anthropic.
Truist also sees North America marketplace sales remaining healthy, growing around 10% year over year.
"We expect higher fuel costs and macro turbulence (assuming it is short lived) to remain manageable," Squali wrote of possible headwinds for Amazon.
Amazon stock advanced 1.9% to $254.34 on Friday, on track to post a record closing high, according to Dow Jones Market Data. For comparison, the S&P 500 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 1.3% and 2%, respectively.
The stock's current record closing high is $254 from November 3, 2025. Amazon has closed higher in nine of the past 10 trading sessions and is up 22% in April. For the year, Amazon shares have advanced 10%.
Meanwhile, Amazon has been making deals.
On Tuesday, Amazon said it would buy Globalstar for the equivalent of $90 a share, valuing the satellite communications company at just under $12 billion. Amazon appears to be trying to build its own space-based broadband network -- a field currently dominated by Elon Musk's Starlink.
Amazon also announced that it signed an agreement with Apple to provide satellite connectivity for current and future iPhone and Apple Watch features. The partnership was made possible via an existing deal Apple already had with Globalstar.
Write to Kit Norton at kit.norton@barrons.com
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April 17, 2026 12:03 ET (16:03 GMT)
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