After Lagging the Market This Year, It's Time to Buy Amazon Stock

Key Points

• Shares have trailed the broader market in 2025.

• Recent results show broad-based momentum across retail, AWS, and advertising.

• Valuation looks reasonable against rising margins and clear AI tailwinds.

• 10 stocks we like better than Amazon ›

Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) has not been the star of 2025. As of mid-September, the stock is up only about the mid-single digits year to date, while the S&P 500 is up roughly in the low teens. That gap has opened even as the retailer and cloud leader posted strong financial results and guided to solid growth.

Amazon, of course, is the e-commerce and cloud-infrastructure giant behind online retail, Prime, and Amazon Web Services (AWS). With the market's attention rotating across themes this year, Amazon's quieter performance masks improving fundamentals. That mismatch sets up a straightforward case: The business is strengthening while the growth stock is merely getting by, creating an opportunity for investors who want to get off the sidelines and own shares of a great company for the long haul.

Where to invest $1,000 right now? Our analyst team just revealed what they believe are the 10 best stocks to buy right now. Learn More »

Image source: Getty Images.

Momentum is building where it matters

Amazon's latest quarter underscored durable growth and expanding profitability. In Q2, the company's net sales rose 13% to $167.7 billion and operating income climbed 31% to $19.2 billion, lifting the operating margin to 11.4%, up substantially from 9.9% in the year-ago quarter. Earnings per share were $1.68, up 33% year over year. Management also pointed to a healthy outlook: Third-quarter net sales are expected to grow 10% to 13%, with operating income between $15.5 billion and $20.5 billion.

Beneath the headline numbers, the three engines investors care most about are moving in the right direction. First, AWS revenue increased 17% to $30.9 billion. Operating margin in the segment was 32.9%. While that margin is lower than the prior quarter as Amazon invests in capacity and power to meet artificial intelligence (AI) demand, trailing-12-month AWS operating margin remains a robust 36.8%. Second, advertising services revenue rose 23% to $15.7 billion, showing the company's growing clout with merchants and brands. Third, the core retail network continues to scale efficiently: operating income in its important North America retail segment increased 48% to $7.5 billion, with the segment margin improving to 7.5%. Its international retail segment saw operating income jump from $0.3 billion to $1.5 billion as sales rose 16% year over year.

In his comments in the company's second-quarter earnings release, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy drew attention to AI.

"Our AI progress across the board continues to improve our customer experiences, speed of innovation, operational efficiency, and business growth, and I'm excited for what lies ahead," Jassy said.

Put simply, Amazon is converting more of its enormous revenue base into profit as logistics and data center assets scale.

The investment case today

The near-term bear case boils down to two points: massive capital expenditures and competition. Capital spending remains heavy as Amazon expands data centers, networking, and power to support AI workloads; reflecting the build-out, trailing-12-month free cash flow (the cash left over after both regular operations and capital expenditures are taken care of) was $18.2 -- down from $53 billion in the year-ago period. And in cloud, Microsoft and Alphabet are formidable, well-capitalized competitors that are similarly investing aggressively in AI.

Those are real considerations, but they sit alongside strengthening unit economics in retail, a rapidly expanding ads business, and a cloud platform that is growing rapidly as Amazon pivots to AI-centric demand. Additionally, Amazon's significant investment in AI can also be seen as a reason to be upbeat. After all, the company wouldn't be spending so aggressively if it didn't believe there would be a payoff.

With shares trading in the low-$230s as of this writing, Amazon trades for roughly 35 times earnings. That is not cheap, but context matters: Operating margin for the company has marched from single digits to more than 11%, and the company could see additional operating leverage as revenue rises and as AWS becomes a larger share of overall revenue. Additionally, if AWS's already lucrative margins stabilize as new capacity comes online, and retail continues to generate mid- to high-single-digit margins at scale, earnings power may climb faster than revenue over the next few years. In that scenario, today's multiple may not look demanding.

On the other hand, a slower economy could weigh on discretionary spending, and cloud optimization could resurface. Further, power constraints or supply chain delays tied to data center buildouts could also pressure AWS's margins in the near term. Investors, therefore, should keep an eye on capex and AWS profitability as leading indicators.

But the bigger picture is constructive. Amazon is firing on several cylinders: retail margins are improving as the logistics network densifies, advertising is growing at meaningful rates, and AWS remains the backbone for thousands of enterprises. Not to mention that Amazon is layering in AI services across its business, creating new long-term growth opportunities. These dynamics -- broad-based growth, rising profitability, and aggressive investment in AI -- make a compelling case to use 2025's relative underperformance as an opportunity to buy into the stock's weakness. For investors looking to beef up a portfolio with a high-quality compounder, buying Amazon while sentiment is only lukewarm could prove to be lucrative over the long term.

Should you invest $1,000 in Amazon right now?

Before you buy stock in Amazon, consider this:

The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the 10 best stocks for investors to buy now… and Amazon wasn’t one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years.

Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $662,520!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $1,043,346!*

Now, it’s worth noting Stock Advisor’s total average return is 1,056% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to 188% for the S&P 500. Don’t miss out on the latest top 10 list, available when you join Stock Advisor.

See the 10 stocks »

*Stock Advisor returns as of September 15, 2025

Daniel Sparks and his cliens have no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft. The Motley Fool recommends the following options: long January 2026 $395 calls on Microsoft and short January 2026 $405 calls on Microsoft. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.