Just realized something about Amazon that most people completely miss when they're chasing AI stocks everywhere. Everyone's so focused on whether Amazon's getting left behind in the AI race, but the real story is way more interesting.

Here's what caught my attention: Amazon's operating profits jumped 31% in Q2. That's solid, but here's the thing nobody talks about - it's not coming from e-commerce like you'd think. The North American commerce division pulled in $7.5 billion operating profit on $100 billion in sales. Sounds good until you realize most of that profit is actually coming from their advertising business, not selling stuff.

Their ad services division grew 23% year-over-year and it's becoming a real profit machine. If you compare it to Meta's advertising business which runs 30-45% operating margins, Amazon's ad division is probably crushing it too. Meanwhile AWS, their cloud computing arm, is sitting at 33% operating margins. That's the kind of profitability that changes the game.

Why does this matter? Because AWS isn't slowing down. Everyone building AI models needs computing infrastructure, and AWS is renting them the data center capacity they can't build themselves. The global cloud market alone is expected to grow from $752 billion in 2024 to $2.39 trillion by 2030. That's not a modest uptick - that's transformational growth.

So if you model Amazon's operating profits growing at a conservative 20% annually through 2030, you're looking at roughly $210 billion in operating profit by then. That's a 172% increase from current levels. Even if you assume Amazon trades at a more modest 25x operating profits instead of today's 32x, that puts the stock somewhere around $492. We're talking about an amazon stock price forecast that could see nearly a 100% return in less than six years, even with conservative assumptions baked in.

The market's been so obsessed with the obvious AI narrative that it's sleeping on what's actually driving Amazon's profit engine right now. AWS plus advertising equals a company that's way more profitable than people realize, and that's before you even factor in what their AI investments could unlock. This is the kind of thing that makes you wonder what else the consensus is getting wrong about the bigger tech players.