Microsoft and Amazon gain on AI spending

Microsoft’s shares jumped sharply to $530.61 on Nov. 6 after touching $555.80 a day earlier, leaving the stock well above both its 50-day and 200-day moving averages. Amazon also rose to $259.30, supported by a rebound from recent weakness. The gains came alongside renewed appetite for the Nasdaq-100, even as QQQ had fallen steeply over the prior sessions and remained under pressure on its own technical readings, including a weak RSI around 30.5. In other words, the market is still selective: it is buying the companies it sees as AI winners, not the whole index.

The macro backdrop helps explain why. The 10-year Treasury yield has settled near 4.84% to 4.95%, while the fed funds rate sits near 3.88%, keeping financing conditions restrictive but not restrictive enough to break the AI capex cycle. That matters for the market because higher rates normally compress long-duration growth valuations. Yet Microsoft and Amazon are proving resilient precisely because investors view their cloud franchises and balance sheets as strong enough to absorb the cost of expansion. The latest inflation-and-rate regime also keeps pressure on weaker competitors that lack the same scale, pricing power or internal funding.

Amazon’s latest filing showed capital expenditures of $75.9 billion in the third quarter of 2026, up from $34.2 billion a year earlier, with much of it tied to technology infrastructure for AWS. Microsoft has also remained aggressive on infrastructure spending, and both companies are now among the clearest beneficiaries of the AI buildout. That helps explain why the rally has clustered around the hyperscalers: if AI demand is real, these are the companies that capture the servers, networking, storage and enterprise software budgets first.

There is also a broader competitive narrative forming. NVIDIA’s new RTX Spark platform highlights a parallel race between cloud-based AI and local processing, reinforcing that the market is not betting on one architecture but on a larger ecosystem of compute demand. For Microsoft and Amazon, the opportunity is to stay central to that ecosystem whether workloads run in the cloud, at the edge or on devices. For investors, that makes the pair less like ordinary megacaps and more like toll roads on AI adoption.

The bull case is straightforward: earnings growth, cloud demand and AI monetization can outpace rising spending, justifying premium multiples. The bear case is that capex accelerates faster than returns, margins eventually narrow and rate pressure exposes how much future growth is already priced in. For now, the market is siding with the former, and the $424 billion gain shows that when investors want AI exposure, they still begin with Microsoft and Amazon.