Amazon shares have shed roughly 13% from their May peak, sliding from $274.99 on May 6 to the $238-$241 range by late June. The culprit isn’t slowing revenue or a competitive threat. It’s the company’s own checkbook.
Amazon’s 2026 capital expenditure budget, focused almost entirely on AI infrastructure, clocks in at approximately $200 billion. Investors, it turns out, would like to see some of that money come back before the next ice age.
The spending problem Wall Street can’t ignore
On June 8, Amazon secured a term loan facility worth $17.5 billion. The move signaled that even a company with Amazon’s cash generation capacity needs to tap debt markets to fund the scale of its ambitions.
What spooked the market was the implication: free cash flow, the metric investors use to gauge how much real money a business produces, could face meaningful compression over the near term.
