Key Points
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Amazon stock is currently 20% below its record high due in part to concerns about the company’s massive investments in artificial intelligence infrastructure.
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Amazon recently announced an expanded partnership with OpenAI that will bring stateful models to its generative AI development platform.
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Amazon’s Zoox has provided more than 350,000 autonomous rides in Las Vegas and San Francisco, and its robotaxis are coming to Austin and Miami this year.
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Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) shares have fallen 20% from their high due in part to concerns about the company’s plan to spend about $200 billion on capital expenditures this year. Also, recession fears have resurfaced because the U.S.-Iran war has pushed oil prices to a multiyear high. That has hurt consumer discretionary stocks like Amazon.
However, Amazon shareholders recently got some great news about the company’s artificial intelligence and robotaxi businesses. Here are the important details.
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A Zoox robotaxi on the Las Vegas Strip. Image source: Zoox.
Amazon expanded its partnership with OpenAI
In February, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and OpenAI announced an expanded partnership. Amazon plans to invest $50 billion in the San Francisco-based start-up, and OpenAI will spend $138 billion (including a previous $38 billion commitment) on AWS cloud services over the next eight years.
The expanded partnership includes OpenAI’s commitment to consume about 2 gigawatts of Trainium capacity through AWS infrastructure. Trainium is a custom AI chip developed to accelerate model training workflows, though it has also been tuned to support inference. Anthropic already uses more than a million Trainium chips, so OpenAI’s commitment affords Amazon’s custom silicon even more credibility.
Additionally, Amazon and OpenAI will create a stateful runtime environment (SRE) powered by OpenAI models, including the models that power ChatGPT. The SRE will be available on Amazon Bedrock, a generative artificial intelligence development platform. Stateful means applications and agents built on the platform will remember context from previous conversations.
I make that distinction because Microsoft Azure holds exclusive rights to stateless OpenAI APIs (application programming interfaces). That means any stateless application or agent that accesses OpenAI models via API must run on Azure infrastructure. What’s the difference? Stateless API calls are fine for simple tasks, but stateful API calls are necessary for multistep workflows.
“If your organization relies on standard API calls for content generation, summarization, or simple chat, Microsoft Azure remains the primary destination,” writes VentureBeat. “If your goal is to build ‘AI coworkers’ that require deep integration with AWS-hosted data and persistent memory access across weeks of work, the AWS stateful runtime environment is the clear choice.”
Here’s why this matters: AWS reported 24% revenue in the fourth quarter, marking its fastest growth in over four years. With OpenAI models now available through Amazon Bedrock, revenue growth could continue accelerating the coming quarters.
Amazon’s Zoox is coming to Austin and Miami
In 2020, Amazon acquired Zoox, an autonomous driving technology company founded in 2014. Last year, Zoox began offering free trips to the public in Las Vegas and San Francisco, and its robotaxis have since carried about 350,000 riders. This year, the company plans to expand its coverage area in both cities, and it will begin offering rides to a limited number of people in Austin and Miami.
Amazon’s Zoox is a few years behind Alphabet‘s Waymo, which provided more than 14 million trips in 2025 alone, and is on pace to deliver a million rides per week by the end of 2026. Additionally, Waymo already offers paid robotaxi services in 10 U.S. cities across Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, and Texas.
Not only has Zoox served fewer riders across fewer cities, but also the company is still awaiting regulatory approval to charge for rides. On March 11, Zoox submitted an application to operate a commercial ride-sharing service with up to 2,500 robotaxis. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration will make a decision by April 10.
Looking ahead, Morgan Stanley analysts believe Zoox will account for 12% of autonomous vehicle trips per year by 2032. That would put the company in fourth place behind Waymo (34%), Tesla (25%), and Uber (22%). Morgan Stanley estimates robotaxis have an addressable market of more than $1 trillion in the U.S. alone.
Here’s why this matters: Most investors are well aware that Amazon has a strong presence in e-commerce, digital advertising, and cloud computing, but Zoox could become a fourth major revenue stream over the next decade.
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Trevor Jennewine has positions in Amazon and Tesla. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, Tesla, and Uber Technologies. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.
