Amazon could rally more than 30%, KeyBanc says, citing AI read‑throughs in AWS

KeyBanc Capital Markets just put a new $300 price target on Amazon, projecting a 35.8% rally from Thursday’s close. That’s coming from a stock that’s barely moved this year, up less than 1% year-to-date.

The firm resumed coverage on the e-commerce and cloud giant with an overweight rating, calling the current valuation “an attractive entry point” based on its 22.9x 2027E price-to-earnings ratio.

The main reason? Artificial intelligence is reshaping everything, and KeyBanc thinks Amazon’s cloud arm, AWS, is still in the game, despite what the skeptics say.“AWS has still been growing absolute revenue dollars near or better than competitors,” the bank wrote.

KeyBanc pointed to gigawatt-scale data center expansions like Project Rainier and heavyweight AI customers such as Anthropic as signs of a rebound into 2026. “We would be surprised if AWS was left behind in the AI revolution,” they added.

Analysts bullish on Amazon’s grocery business

KeyBanc also sees Amazon’s advertising business as a key source of upside, calling out both on-platform ads (like sponsored product listings and Prime Video placements) and off-platform opportunities. “We believe Amazon’s off-platform business is better positioned than Google’s Network business,” the note said, citing the company’s exclusive user data as a long-term advantage.

KeyBanc also flagged Amazon’s grocery segment as a serious threat to smaller food retailers, specifically with its plans to roll out same-day perishable delivery in over 2,300 U.S. cities, up from just 1,000 today.

The expansion is scheduled to wrap up by the end of 2025. The bank sees this as a smart way to steal market share from less tech-savvy grocers, using its existing delivery and logistics muscle to dominate perishable goods too.

AWS outage wrecks thousands of apps and sites

Few days before the note, Cryptopolitan reported that Amazon Web Services had suffered a major outage that disrupted over 2,000 companies, including apps like Robinhood, Coinbase, Venmo, Fidelity, Signal, Snapchat, Duolingo, Roblox, and even Ring smart doorbells.

According to AWS, the issue started with a “latent defect” in its automated DNS management system, which handles domain name records for DynamoDB, the company’s cloud-native NoSQL database service.

Both the DynamoDB DNS planner and enactor have now been disabled globally, while engineering teams work on long-term fixes and new safeguards.

The bug triggered a chain reaction in AWS’s US-East-1 datacenter region in Virginia, where an empty DNS record failed to update. The automation system didn’t catch it, didn’t fix it, and manual intervention was needed to patch the problem.

At its peak, the incident generated more than 8.1 million outage reports, according to Downdetector. Banking apps, gaming platforms, and streaming services were all hit, once again raising questions around AWS’s reliability, especially as it seeks to scale AI infrastructure.