Amazon made plenty of news this week — from advances in the cloud business to questions about its partnership with the U.S. Postal Service — leaving investors with a lot to digest. The flurry of headlines comes at the end of a challenging year. The e-commerce and cloud giant’s stock is up 4.6%, compared to the broad market S & P 500’s 16.4%, and well behind all of its Magnificent Seven peers. Despite the company showing reaccelerating growth in AWS and enhancements to its dominant Prime e-commerce ecosystem, investors remain concerned that it is losing ground in the AI race and could face margin pressure from tariffs. We believe the company has turned a corner. “A better year is ahead as management continues to prove out its AI strategy and expand operating margins,” Jeff Marks, portfolio director for Club, wrote in a report on Thursday, highlighting stocks that are set up for a bounce back in 2026. Here’s how this week’s news fits into that investment thesis: Upbeat updates at cloud event News: During Amazon ‘s annual re:Invent 2025 conference in Las Vegas, Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman unveiled Trainium3 , the latest version of the company’s in-house custom chip. It delivers four times the compute performance, energy efficiency, and memory bandwidth of previous generations. AWS also announced that it is already working on Trainium4. The company also revealed a series of cloud products, including advanced AI-driven platforms and agents that help customers automate workloads. Our take: We were pleased to hear that AWS continues to innovate its chip offerings to diversify its reliance on Nvidia , the industry leader in graphics processing units (GPUs). However, most of the investor focus is on bringing data center capacity online. Amazon needs to buy more Nvidia chips to catch up in AI. Also, Jim Cramer interviewed AWS CEO Matt Garman on “Mad Money” earlier this week, who was upbeat about the future growth of the cloud business. USPS ties tested News: According to a Washington Post report, Amazon could sever its relationship with the USPS when its contract expires in October 2026. Amazon likely considered the move, as it already has a shadow postal service, Amazon Logistics, that handles billions of packages annually. By removing USPS as the middleman, Amazon would have complete financial and operational control. Amazon refuted the report . Our take: For years, the e-commerce and cloud giant invested billions of dollars to build a vast logistics network that is now delivering more packages in the U.S. than UPS and FedEx . It still uses the USPS for delivery of small, low-weight packages, especially those from third-party Amazon sellers. USPS is also helpful for “last-mile delivery” in difficult-to-serve geographic areas. If the company were to eliminate the Postal Service as a middleman, it could further reduce its cost to serve, thereby improving margins. Possible IPO payday News: Anthropic, the AI startup behind the Claude…
Read More: Amazon had a big week that could shape where its stagnant stock goes next
