Cathie Wood and Stanley Druckenmiller Both Bet Bigger on Amazon
Aug 21, 2026 · Trading Tips
Two of the market's most closely watched investors are making the same bet for very different reasons. Newly disclosed second-quarter 13F filings show Cathie Wood's ARK Investment Management and Stanley Druckenmiller's Duquesne Family Office both increased their stakes in Amazon, wagering that accelerating cloud growth outweighs the company's soaring AI infrastructure spending.
Druckenmiller raised his Amazon stake by 1,083% to 541,600 shares worth $129 million, while Wood increased ARK's position 18% to about 1.59 million shares worth $379 million, now 2.46% of her portfolio. The buying lines up with real numbers: AWS revenue grew 37% year over year in the second quarter, up from 28% the prior quarter -- the fifth straight quarter of accelerating growth -- with backlog hitting $496 billion, up $130 billion in a single quarter. AWS operating margin climbed to 39.4%, up 6.5 percentage points, helped by Amazon's push into its own chips: Graviton processors now run on 98% of the top 1,000 EC2 customers, and Anthropic has committed to spending more than $10 billion a year on Amazon's Trainium silicon.
The catch for investors is cash flow. Amazon's free cash flow turned negative to the tune of $7.6 billion on a trailing 12-month basis, and the company raised its 2026 capital spending guidance to $220 billion from $200 billion, with management saying capacity still won't meet demand into next year. AWS growth is also concentrated in a handful of AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic -- a risk if that demand doesn't materialize as contracted. Still, Amazon's forward P/E of about 21 is down 87% from its five-year average near 160, and its PEG ratio of 1.03 suggests the growth rate justifies the premium versus sector peers. The takeaway for investors: when a growth-focused stock picker and a macro-driven veteran are buying the same name for different reasons, it's worth watching Amazon on capex-driven pullbacks rather than dismissing the stock over near-term cash burn.