The Ultimate Growth Stock to Buy With $1,000 Right Now

Growth stocks have been leading the market higher for more than a decade, and there is no reason to think that dynamic won't continue over the long term.

The ultimate growth stock to buy right now is Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN), which has solid growth opportunities and is trading at an attractive valuation. You can start with a smaller amount, like $1,000, and look to add more on any market dip.

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An e-commerce leader

The market leader in e-commerce, Amazon does not get nearly the credit it deserves for what the company has being doing behind the scenes to improve its business and set it up for future growth.

The company's e-commerce business is a solid revenue grower, but the real story is the operating leverage that Amazon is seeing in this business. Amazon became the dominant player in e-commerce by building out a huge network of fulfillment centers and creating one of the top logistics networks in the world. Today, it has turned to artificial intelligence (AI) and robots to drive even more efficiency.

The company has deployed more than 1 million robots at its facilities, all of which are coordinated by its DeepFleet AI model. This helps the robots run like well-oiled machines, and many can do more than just lift boxes. For example, some can detect damage before an item is shipped, which helps save on costly returns.

At the same time, Amazon is also using AI to help improve productivity and save costs. Examples of this include using AI to optimize drivers' routes, helping drivers find hard-to-locate drop-off locations in places like large apartment complexes, and even helping the company determine which warehouses to store items so they are closer to final destinations.

On top of this, Amazon has also been using AI to help drive growth at its high-gross-margin sponsored ad business. AI is helping advertisers improve ad campaigns and better target potential customers, which helped Amazon's ad revenue climb 24% to $17.7 billion last quarter.

All of this is creating strong operating leverage, which was seen in its third quarter results. Last quarter, Amazon's North American segment saw its adjusted operating income soar 28% to $7.3 billion on just an 11% increase in revenue to $106.3 billion. While strong revenue growth is sexy, don't underestimate the importance of profitability growth and how Amazon is driving it.

A cloud computing leader

While Amazon is best known for its e-commerce operations, the company's largest segment by profitability is Amazon Web Services (AWS). Amazon created the cloud computing industry, and it remains the market share leader today.

Given the unit's size, AWS has not grown as quickly as rivals Microsoft's Azure or Alphabet's Google Cloud, but it is starting to see revenue growth accelerate. In Q3, AWS revenue climbed 20%, which was up from 17.5% growth in Q2 and 17% growth in Q1. However, the company upped its capital expenditure (capex) budget and growth for the segment could just be starting to rev up.

The company just opened up one of the world's largest AI clusters in Project Rainier, which was built exclusively for Anthropic and uses Amazon's custom Trainium 2 AI chips. It also recently signed a seven-year, $38 billion deal with OpenAI to provide it with Amazon EC2 UltraServers that run on Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs). In addition, Amazon just announced it will spend $50 billion building out 1.3 gigawatts of data center capacity to support the U.S. government agencies.

Amazon has a strong cloud offering, giving customers access to a variety of foundational models (both its own and third parties') through its Bedrock solution, while users can also train or customize their own models with its SageMaker platform. Amazon has also moved into AI agents, letting customers create AI agents with Strands (an open-source platform), and then they can deploy and operate these AI agents through its AgentCore platform. This should position the company well for the future.

Between its potential cloud computing growth opportunities and the leverage it is seeing in its e-commerce business, Amazon is a stock to own for the long term. The stock also isn't pricey, trading at a forward price-to-earnings ratio of 29 times 2026 analyst estimates, which is well below traditional retailers like Costco, which has a 40 times forward P/E, and Walmart, which has a 36 times forward P/E based on next year's analyst estimates.

Geoffrey Seiler has positions in Alphabet and Amazon. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Alphabet, Amazon, Costco Wholesale, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Walmart. 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.