While Amazon (AMZN +0.20%) stock has shown strength of late, it has actually been one of the laggards among the "Magnificent Seven" stocks since the end of the pandemic. Amazon's stock is only about 15% higher than it was at its pandemic peak in late 2021.
However, the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution is unlocking a lot of new growth possibilities for the e-commerce and cloud giant. In fact, CEO Andy Jassy recently sent a letter to employees this month outlining how AI is transforming every aspect of Amazon's empire.
On that note, here are three exciting new growth initiatives for Amazon shareholders to look forward to over the next year.
NASDAQ: AMZN
Key Data Points
1. Taking fast delivery to rural America
Though Amazon is practically a conglomerate today, its original business and backbone is e-commerce. And what separates Amazon from the pack is its convenience -- items delivered fast to your door, in a price-competitive fashion.
Amazon has continually cemented its lead by investing in faster delivery times under its Prime subscription, first offering two-day delivery on many items, then investing in one-day shipping starting in 2019, and then eventually same-day shipping. Delivering a critical mass of items fast is really hard to do.
But never satisfied, Amazon recently said it will soon push its limits even further. This past week, Amazon announced it would be expanding its one- and same-day delivery to more rural communities and small U.S. towns, with a pledge to spend $4 billion through 2026 to triple its delivery network in those areas. The move not only looks to expand Amazon's total addressable market, but also takes the competition to Walmart and dollar stores on their home turf.
Amazon's North American revenue grew 7.6% last quarter, which of course includes advertising, physical stores, and third-party sellers. Still, it's the e-commerce arm that helps funnel all those revenue streams, so investors should keep a lookout to see if Amazon's rural initiatives help sustain that solid growth.
2. Project Kuiper takes off
Going from Amazon's oldest business to its newest, the ambitious Project Kuiper could start to generate revenues beginning in late 2025.
Project Kuiper is Amazon's satellite-based broadband venture, and has been in the works for at least six years. However, things are starting to get interesting on this front, with Kuiper just having launched its first 27 satellites on April 28, on its way to a total of 3,236 when all is said and done. By July 2026, Amazon expects to have half that total in orbit.
Image source: Getty Images.
Still, it won't be that long before Amazon sees Kuiper revenues, with Amazon saying it expects to start commercial service sometime in late 2025. Kuiper has stated it could offer speeds up to 400 megabits per second for consumers, and up to 1 gigabit per second to commercial customers. That's faster than Elon Musk's Starlink, which offers 25 to 100 mbps speeds on standard plans.
While the venture isn't on many investors' radars right now, CEO Andy Jassy has been excited about Kuiper and believes it can be a strong third leg of profits for Amazon, in addition to e-commerce and cloud computing.
3. Cheaper and more powerful AI with Trainium 3
Artificial intelligence is all the rage right now, but it's quite difficult to know which large company will be the winner: a large Magnificent Seven name, or an upstart like OpenAI?
Amazon is competing in AI with the same strategy it has applied to other businesses -- offering the largest breadth of customer choice through its Amazon Bedrock platform, while also driving down costs through vertical integration in order to become the largest-scale, lowest-cost provider of AI services.
Driving down costs starts with semiconductors, and while the first-mover leading AI chipmaker is obviously Nvidia, given how expensive Nvidia's high-priced chips are, all cloud giants are now investing in their own custom AI chips.
Amazon has been a leader on that front, having purchased chipmaker Annapurna Labs back in 2015 for just $350 million -- a deal that looks like an absolute bargain today, given how important custom chips are now for all major tech giants.
Over the past decade, Amazon developed its own Graviton processors for low-cost cloud workloads. And when AI took off, Amazon developed its own AI chip called Trainium. While not as powerful as the latest Nvidia chip, Trainium also costs a lot less, with Amazon maintaining that Trainium 2's price performance exceeds that of Nvidia's by about 40%.
In fact, AI LLM company Anthropic, an OpenAI rival in which Amazon has invested billions, built its latest and greatest Claude 4 models completely on Trainium, not Nvidia. Having trained one of today's most capable models is a pretty big milestone for Amazon's chip.
In late 2025, Trainium 3 will come to market on AWS, with Amazon forecasting a whopping 50% increase in performance compared to Trainium 2. CEO Andy Jassy has said AI has the potential to drive revenues beyond the "multi-hundred billions" originally contemplated for Amazon Web Services, which generated $112 billion over the past 12 months. Look for Amazon's latest Trainium chip to be instrumental on that front in 2026 and beyond.
