Wall Street apparently loves what it saw at Amazon Web Service’s mega cloud computing conference this week.
The tech giant’s stock received two major price hikes following its annual re:Invent conference, which was marked by a slew of new products and high-profile partnerships bolstering Amazon’s market dominance in the cloud.
Wells Fargo raised its price target for Amazon shares to $1,525 from $1,430 and also raised its 2019 sales estimate for AWS by 3 percent to $31.3 billion.
Oppenheimer analyst Jason Helfstein also raised his price target Friday for Amazon to $1,330 from $1,165.
Amazon shares closed Thursday at $1,176 and have jumped 57 percent this year.
Several other analysts this week also raised their price targets for Amazon’s stock. Wall Street’s bullish outlook is due in large part to Amazon’s lucrative cloud computing business, which is on pace to make $18 billion in revenue this year.
In a note to clients Friday, Wells Fargo analyst Analyst Ken Sena cited the numerous AWS announcements during this week’s conference, which featured a focus on artificial intelligence and machine learning.Amazon announced five new machine learning services at the event.
Specifically, Sena singled out AWS’ SageMaker as a “game-changer” for the AI and machine learning market, according to CNBC.
“SageMaker allows one to build, train, validate, and deploy different models with incredible ease,” Sena wrote in his note. It “solves one of the biggest human demands in ML.”
“We are increasing our Amazon price target … on higher outer-year AWS [Amazon Web Services] estimates and a higher SOTP [sum of the parts] value,” Sena wrote. There were “numerous announcements at this week’s AWS re:Invent Conference, particularly around AI / ML where AWS appears to be strengthening their position within the market.”
