Amazon shares have delivered a 560 percent total return over the past decade, more than double the S&P 500’s 251 percent gain, while Visa has climbed 366 percent in the same span. Both stocks have tracked the broader market so far in 2026, yet analysts project earnings growth near 20 percent annually for each, a pace that, if sustained, would keep them ahead of the benchmark without requiring multiple expansion.
The cloud runway is longer than the market prices
Amazon Web Services posted 37 percent revenue growth in the June quarter, reaching $42 billion with a 39 percent operating margin. Chief executive Andy Jassy has said the segment could eventually hit $1 trillion in annual sales; at today’s margin that implies roughly $400 billion of operating profit from AWS alone. The unit’s contracted backlog stands at $496 billion and is expanding at a triple-digit rate. Jassy told analysts on the second-quarter call that demand will exceed data-center supply through 2027 and described 2028 visibility as “striking.”
Microsoft remains the shadow competitor
Azure continues to close the market-share gap, and the cloud oligopoly means pricing power is never guaranteed. Amazon’s advantage rests on workload gravity, more AI inference sits next to existing applications and data in AWS than anywhere else, but the capital intensity of staying ahead is rising. Every dollar of new data-center investment converts to revenue almost immediately because capacity is sold before it is commissioned, yet the spend required to keep that loop turning is measured in tens of billions per year.
The toll-booth model absorbs the cycle
Visa’s network processed more than $4 trillion of volume in a single quarter for the first time, a 10 percent year-over-year increase that drove revenue up 14 percent to $11.6 billion. The company keeps roughly half of every revenue dollar as profit, a margin structure that survives uneven consumer spending because the toll is collected on authorization, clearing and settlement, not on credit risk. Value-added services such as fraud protection grew 34 percent in constant currency last quarter, and nearly all of that revenue attaches to accounts already riding Visa’s rails.
What to watch next
For Amazon, the test is whether AWS can maintain mid-thirties percentage growth while absorbing the depreciation wave from the current build-out. For Visa, the question is whether value-added services can keep expanding at a third faster than the core network once the easy attach-rate gains are exhausted. Both companies trade at market caps, $2.8 trillion and roughly $600 billion respectively, that already price in a decade of above-average compounding. The next earnings cycle will show if the backlog and the volume trajectory are still accelerating or merely normalizing.