After Wall Street resumed on Tuesday, February 17, after Monday’s Presidents’ Day vacation, Amazon Inc. shares continued to be under pressure.
The shares fell 1.34% to hit the day’s low of $196.13, the lowest level since May 2025, after began the day at $198.13, just above Friday’s finish of $197.79. However, they were unable to maintain the modestly positive start and swiftly continued their losing run.
According to TradingView statistics, Tuesday’s decrease was the e-commerce giant’s tenth straight day of losses, bringing the 10-day cumulative fall to 19.3% based on the day’s low price and pushing the month-to-date slide to 18%.
The company’s mixed fourth-quarter earnings and the revelation of significant capital expenditure plans to construct AI infrastructure were the catalysts for the recent stock market meltdown.
Last week, the Nasdaq-listed business revealed its financial results for the quarter that ended in December. It reported sales of $213.4 billion, which was 14% higher than the same period the previous year.
Compared to $20 billion, or $1.86 per share, a year earlier, net income for the fourth quarter was $21.19 billion, or $1.95 per share.
The outcomes coincide with Amazon’s ongoing employment reductions. Following around 14,000 job layoffs in October, the business revealed earlier this month that it will lay off roughly 16,000 corporate staff.
In order to satisfy the rising demand for artificial intelligence, the e-commerce behemoth joined competitors in projecting much higher spending this year, making investments in data centers and other infrastructure.
Investors are worried that Amazon’s huge AI wager would not pay off in the long run and could have an impact on the company’s short-term operational performance. Amazon announced that it will spend $200 billion this year on data centers, semiconductors, and other equipment.
In total, US tech companies now plan to invest an unprecedented $650 billion in data centers and the AI chips that drive them.
Wall Street is trading lower
As technology firms continue to face pressure, the US stock market is in the red, with the S&P 500 down 0.6% and the Nasdaq Composite down even more, by 1%.
Investors are nonetheless worried that cutting-edge AI capabilities can displace software companies who specialize in a given industry. The blue-chip Dow and the S&P 500 both had declines of more than 1% last week, while the technology-heavy Nasdaq Composite plunged more than 2%.
Even while employment growth surprisingly surged in January, these worries seem to have eclipsed the most recent US consumer price index data, which came in lower than market projections.
