Investors are overlooking a golden artificial-intelligence opportunity that sits right in front of them, according to one analyst.
Amazon.com's (AMZN) stock is a "top pick" for Morgan Stanley analyst Brian Nowak, who believes both Amazon Web Services and the company's retail business are shaping up to be massive beneficiaries of the AI wave.
While Amazon's $200 billion capital-expenditures budget for 2026 raised fears of overspending, Nowak wrote in a Wednesday note that Amazon is on track to reap an impressive "yield" from its spending plans. He reiterated his overweight rating and $300 price target, 50% higher than current levels.
Nowak's view isn't exactly a popular one on Wall Street. Amazon's stock posted its worst losing streak since 2006 last week and plunged into a bear market. Shares were trading at $205.98 Wednesday, down 9% year to date. Over a two-year span, the stock is only up 21%, trailing the S&P 500's SPX 37% gain.
"We remain bullish through this uncertainty and continue to think [Amazon] is the most underappreciated gen-AI winner of our coverage," Nowak wrote.
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AWS has been the main driver of sentiment for Amazon shares, and Nowak believes increasing capex is a bullish signal for the cloud business - one that could help drive over 30% growth for the segment. Last quarter, AWS growth accelerated to 24%, the fastest rate in 13 quarters.
"Investing and opening data centers will still dictate the slope of growth," Nowak wrote. Amazon, like other hyperscalers, has been capacity-constrained, meaning that it can't bring data centers online fast enough to fulfill customer demand. Nowak is measuring Amazon's return on its investment through a "capex yield."
According to Morgan Stanley's "capex yield" framework, which looks at incremental revenue as a percentage of capex, AWS's base-case yield of roughly 34 to 40 cents is about 50% below its long-term historical average of 77 cents.
If that yield improves even slightly to 45 cents - which is still a 40% discount to historical norms - AWS growth could surge into the mid-30% range, according to Nowak. Such an outcome would far exceed current market expectations of 25% to 26% for 2026 and 2027, he noted.
Additionally, Nowak believes Amazon will get a lift from the rise of agentic commerce - meaning that AI agents, such as Amazon's Rufus or third-party tools like OpenAI's ChatGPT, will handle the researching and purchasing of products. Rufus has already shown a 140-basis-point boost to growth in gross merchandise value as of late 2025.
The bigger opportunity could come from Amazon's existing collection of inventory, shipping infrastructure and other technological investments. Amazon sits on valuable shopping data that will be essential to any agentic shopping application, whether it be for ChatGPT, Google Gemini $(GOOGL)$ $(GOOG)$ or Meta Platforms (META).
"We look for horizontal agentic partnerships to emerge, which will make investors feel more confident in [Amazon's] long-term positioning," Nowak wrote.
Amazon's stock currently trades at roughly 19 times Morgan Stanley's 2027 earnings estimate of $10.41.
On a price-to-earnings-to-growth basis, Amazon trades at a 0.8x - a 40% discount to its peer median of 1.4x. Even at Morgan Stanley's $300 price target, Amazon would still trade at a 13% discount to the peer median.