Amazon's Two-Front Battle: Instant Deliveries and a $70 Billion Ad Juggernaut

Amazon races to deliver groceries in 30 minutes while building a $70 billion ad business, aiming to dominate everyday spending and driving stock gains.

Amazon is charging hard on two fronts that, together, could redefine how consumers interact with the e-commerce titan. The company is racing to deliver groceries in 30 minutes while simultaneously building a $70 billion advertising business that rivals traditional media. Both initiatives are feeding into a single goal: making Amazon indispensable for everyday spending.

Speed becomes a Prime perk

The Seattle-based giant is rolling out Amazon Now, a 30-minute delivery service for fresh groceries, household essentials and local favourites, to nine US cities. After a pilot in Seattle and Philadelphia last December, the company is expanding to Atlanta, Dallas-Fort Worth, Austin, Houston, Minneapolis, Orlando, Phoenix, Denver and Oklahoma City by year-end.

Prime members pay $3.99 per delivery, while non-members face a steep $13.99. Small orders incur extra fees: $1.99 for Prime subscribers and $3.99 for others. Udit Madan, senior vice president of worldwide operations, positions the service for moments when customers need items in under half an hour. In many areas, Amazon Now will operate around the clock, enabled by smaller fulfilment hubs positioned closer to residential neighbourhoods.

The move raises the stakes for DoorDash, Instacart and Walmart, which have long competed on speed. Walmart boasts it can reach 95% of US households within three hours. Amazon delivered more than 13 billion items worldwide to Prime customers on the same or next day in 2025, with groceries and daily essentials accounting for roughly half of that volume.

Advertising becomes the profit engine

While logistics captures headlines, Amazon's ad business has quietly grown into a powerhouse worth $70 billion over the past twelve months. At its Upfront presentation in New York, the company showcased how it plans to capture even more brand budgets.

Amazon now reaches 300 million ad-supported consumers in the US, eclipsing traditional television networks. Its new "Dynamic TV Creative" format uses artificial intelligence to tailor interactive video ads to individual shopping behaviours among Prime Video viewers. The company is also spending heavily on content: the next season of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power launches on 11 November 2026, and it has greenlit a series adaptation of the bestseller Fourth Wing along with more seasons of hits like Reacher and exclusive NFL games.

Advertising revenue jumped 24% year-on-year in the first quarter. And Amazon is no longer limiting ad sales to its own ecosystem — its demand-side platform now places ads on competitors' services including Netflix, Disney and Spotify. This high-margin business provides a cushion for Amazon's enormous capital expenditure plans, which stand at roughly $200 billion for 2026, primarily directed at data centres and AI infrastructure for AWS.

Stock performance reflects the dual momentum

Amazon shares traded near EUR 227.65 on Wednesday, up about 0.5% on the day and roughly 17.8% since the start of 2025. The stock sits about 16% above its 200-day moving average and just a few percentage points below its recent 52-week high. TD Cowen analyst John Blackledge reiterated a "Buy" rating with a $350 price target.

The advertising division is helping finance the heavy lifting in cloud computing, where AWS is bumping against capacity limits. Net profit exceeded $30 billion in the first quarter alone. CEO Andy Jassy has argued that faster delivery boosts purchase frequency and platform stickiness — a thesis now being tested at the street-corner level with 30-minute grocery runs.

The real challenge will be scaling the micro-hubs efficiently. If Amazon succeeds, Prime will morph from a shipping subscription into an everyday impulse-buy enabler, while the ad machine keeps the margins healthy enough to fund the next wave of AI-driven infrastructure.