13F season produces a lot of noise. Every quarter, the same headlines about what Buffett bought, what Ackman sold, what Tepper is thinking. Most of it doesn’t mean much.
But occasionally two managers who should not agree on anything turn up in the same place at the same time. That happened in Q2. Cathie Wood and Stanley Druckenmiller both bought Amazon and Alphabet.
Wood manages long-duration disruptive growth funds. Druckenmiller runs concentrated macro bets and moves fast when he changes his mind. They are not supposed to like the same things. They did.
What Cathie Wood and Stanley Druckenmiller bought in Q2 2026
Druckenmiller’s move on Amazon is the one that stands out. A 1,083% increase is not a toe dip. Duquesne ended Q2 with 541,600 shares worth roughly $129 million.
Wood’s ARK was quieter about it but still raised its stake 18%, finishing at about 1.59 million shares worth $379 million and sitting at 2.46% of the portfolio, according to Insider Monkey.
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ARK’s Q2 2026 13F, filed Aug. 14, showed the firm increased positions in 80 stocks, with Alphabet and Amazon among the largest additions, Seeking Alpha reported.
On Alphabet, Druckenmiller opened a new position of 336,300 shares worth roughly $120 million, equal to 2.31% of his portfolio. Wood increased ARK’s Alphabet stake by 45% to about 1.04 million shares worth approximately $369 million.
The 13F filings reflect portfolio positions at the end of Q2. They do not confirm whether either investor has held, added to, or reduced those positions since then.
Why Amazon AMZN stock is the center of this trade
The bull case for Amazon starts and ends with AWS. Cloud revenue grew 37% year over year in the second quarter, accelerating from 28% the prior quarter. That was the fifth straight quarter of accelerating growth.
AWS backlog hit $496 billion, up $132 billion in a single quarter and growing triple digits year over year. The division now runs at a $169 billion annualized revenue rate. AWS operating margin rose to roughly 39.4%, up 6.5 percentage points year over year, according to Amazon’s official Q2 earnings release.
Faster growth and expanding margins at this scale is not a common combination. Management attributed the improvement to efficiency gains, better capacity management, and fixed-cost control.
Amazon is also building its own silicon through Trainium and Graviton. Every chip sold by Amazon instead of an outside vendor keeps margin inside the company and allows AWS to offer compute at a lower price without sacrificing economics.
Graviton is already used by 98% of the top 1,000 EC2 customers. Anthropic has committed to spending more than $10 billion annually on Trainium, making it one of Amazon’s most important AI chip customers.
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Amazon AMZN valuation and the bear case investors need to know
The bear case is real, and the numbers behind it are large. Amazon’s trailing 12-month free cash flow turned negative by $7.6 billion in the latest quarter.
The company raised its 2026 capital expenditure outlook to $220 billion from $200 billion, citing higher memory prices and ongoing AI demand. Management said it still will not have enough capacity to meet demand this year or next. The spending will not slow soon.
There is also a customer concentration risk. A significant portion of AWS growth is tied to AI labs including OpenAI and Anthropic. If those customers reduce spending or the AI demand they are contracting for fails to materialize, Amazon could be holding stranded capacity after spending hundreds of billions to build for it.
Amazon’s valuation numbers look expensive until you compare them to the company’s own history. Forward P/E sits at roughly 21, above the sector median of 16. EV-to-sales at 3.62 and price-to-sales at 3.68 are both well above sector peers.
But Amazon has traded at a forward P/E near 160 on its five-year average. At 21, it is 87% cheaper than that. The forward non-GAAP PEG is 1.03 against a sector median of 1.40. The multiple is high. The growth is higher.
Why Alphabet GOOGL stock fits the same AI thesis
Alphabet gives both investors exposure to a related but distinct AI trade. The company operates Google Search, YouTube, Google Cloud, and a growing set of AI products.
Amazon is mostly an infrastructure bet. Alphabet is something different. Google Cloud competes with AWS and Azure for the same enterprise AI contracts. But Google Search and YouTube are still generating enormous amounts of advertising cash every quarter, and that cash is what funds the buildout.
Alphabet gets to run the infrastructure race and the monetization race at the same time. That is probably why Druckenmiller opened a new position and Wood raised hers 45% in the same quarter.
Both stocks carry the same underlying risk. Investors are rewarding companies that can turn AI investment into revenue and margin growth. Any slowdown in AI adoption or any meaningful competitor gains could quickly shift the narrative.
Wood and Druckenmiller are both making a directional bet that the AI buildout has more room to run. The second-quarter 13F filings say they made that bet from the same two starting points.
Related: Cathie Wood buys $28.1 million of popular tech stock
