Amazon CEO Andy Jassy could see how dramatically artificial intelligence was altering e-commerce.

In June, he told employees that AI agents will start to infiltrate aspects of everyday life, “from shopping to travel to daily chores and tasks.”

Four months later, Jassy said on an earnings call that Amazon expects to partner with third-party agents, and has engaged in conversations with some providers, though he didn’t offer names.

Now, Amazon is looking to hire a leader in corporate development to help forge strategic partnerships in areas including “agentic commerce,” according to a recent job posting.

Amazon’s rapid evolution in its view of AI-powered commerce underscores how quickly online retail is changing, and the risks the company faces if it doesn’t act aggressively to maintain control over its future.

The company has watched as OpenAI, Google, Perplexity and Microsoft have released a flurry of e-commerce agents in recent months that aim to change how people shop. Instead of visiting Amazon, Walmart or Nike directly, consumers could rely on AI agents to do the hard work of scanning the web for the best deal or perfect product, then buy the item without exiting a chatbot window.

The first shopping agents from AI leaders were released about a year ago. Consulting firm McKinsey projected that agentic commerce could generate $1 trillion in U.S. retail revenue by 2030.

It’s a trend that poses a threat to Amazon’s margins and relationships with customers. When a consumer uses ChatGPT to initiate a purchase, for example, OpenAI collects “a small fee” from each transaction.

“With an agent on ChatGPT, retailers risk relinquishing transactions on their site to pay a toll on someone else’s highway for the same transaction,” Sucharita Kodali, a retail analyst at Forrester, said in an interview.

Some companies are trying to find a middle ground between working with agent providers and competing against them. Walmart, Shopify and others have adopted a frenemy strategy, announcing partnerships with AI companies while continuing to develop their own tools and setting guardrails around how agents can access their sites.

Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke wrote in a post on X on Tuesday that his company is “building all the layers of infrastructure to power a new cambrian explosion of creativity in shopping.”

“I’m really really excited about Agentic Commerce,” Lutke wrote. “There is so much amazing stuff being built. Everything I test just feels delightful and right.”

Amazon has so far been playing defense.

The company recently updated the code underpinning its website to block external AI agents from crawling it, part of an effort to wall off its valuable training data from rivals. As of Tuesday, Amazon had blocked 47 bots, including those from all the major AI companies, according to its website.

Amazon has even taken the matter to court. In November, Amazon sued Perplexity over an agent in the startup’s Comet browser that allows it to make purchases on a user’s behalf. The company alleged Perplexity took steps to “conceal” its agents so they could continue to scrape Amazon’s website without its approval.

Perplexity called the lawsuit a “bully tactic.”

Meanwhile, Amazon is investing heavily in its own AI products. The company released a shopping chatbot called Rufus last February, and has been testing an agent called Buy For Me, which can purchase products from other sites directly in Amazon’s e-commerce app.

Traffic from AI chatbots to U.S. retail sites has surged in recent months, especially during the holiday season, but research suggests Google search still performs better in terms of conversion rate and revenue per session.

AI-powered shopping remains a nascent market.

OpenAI’s Instant Checkout tool, launched in ChatGPT in September, is only available for some products sold by Walmart, Shopify, Target and Etsy. Users can only purchase one item at a time, and they can’t connect loyalty memberships like Walmart+.

Agents are also prone to glitches.

Scot Wingo, founder of e-commerce software startup ReFiBuy, recently tested Perplexity’s Instant Buy tool that lets users purchase items directly in its search engine.

Wingo tried to buy a cable knit sweater from Abercrombie & Fitch, but Perplexity’s agent repeatedly spit out error messages, even though both products were in stock on the retailer’s website. He eventually gave up.

Earlier this month, Wingo was searching for a coffee machine on ChatGPT when it suggested a Breville espresso maker. When he clicked on the product, he was surprised to see an image of a garden rake.

“These crawlers go out, they pull in this data and you never know exactly what they’re gonna get,” Wingo said.

The company could ultimately take a page from its rivals if it decides to let agents access its primary e-commerce platform. Shopify and Walmart have set boundaries around what external shopping agents can and can’t do on their sites.

Amazon may be willing to let agents access its catalog, but it likely wants to protect more valuable data from its competitors, Wingo said, such as its vast trove of customer reviews and sales rankings, both of which indicate a product’s quality and can help improve an AI chatbot’s answers.

“Those are probably the two most proprietary data points that if I’m Amazon, I want to protect,” Wingo said.

Amazon isn’t giving up on its homegrown tools.

Rufus’ capabilities have improved since Amazon first launched it last year, and the company has been surfacing the chatbot across more areas of its site to drive user adoption.

Amazon recently added a feature where Rufus can auto-buy items on a Prime shopper’s behalf once they hit a certain price. The chatbot now also suggests products from sites across the web, not just on Amazon.

Amazon also began testing a feature in recent weeks that allows Rufus to create custom shopping guides, similar to OpenAI’s “shopping research” tool launched last month.

“Instead of the innovator’s dilemma, I would say Amazon is in what I would call the leader’s dilemma,” said Jordan Berke, founder and CEO of retail consulting firm Tomorrow. “Their market share is so significant that they have the most to lose.”

WATCH: How Amazon came to dominate the U.S. apparel market

Nvidia has been the biggest infrastructure winner in the artificial intelligence boom, soaring in value by almost thirteenfold since the end of 2022 to a market cap of $4.6 trillion.

While Nvidia’s rally continued in 2025, investors betting on other AI data center plays made a lot more money over the past 12 months.

With four of the biggest technology companies projecting collective expenditures of $380 billion on data center and infrastructure build-outs this year, followed by an expected increase in the coming years, Wall Street has poured money into an assortment of vendors that are poised to reap the rewards.

Makers of memory, storage, fiber-optic cables, central processors and other types of enterprise hardware have rocketed in valued this year, driven by excitement around the AI craze.

Investors will be scrutinizing these five companies closely in 2026 now that lofty expectations have been built into their stock prices.

Lumentum, based in San Jose, California, makes switches, transceivers and other optical laser-based parts that are needed for fiber-optic cables. Customers have typically been telecommunications carriers and device makers like Apple, which previously used Lumentum parts in its FaceID sensor. 

But AI servers also need a lot of optical connections. Every graphics processing unit in a rack needs to be connected to every other GPU. Future AI systems will scale out, which requires optical connections from rack to rack. Eventually, entire data centers will need to be connected to each other with fiber-optic connections. 

Lumentum’s stock price has jumped 361% this year, lifting the company’s market cap past $27 billion. Sales surged 58% in the most recent quarter from a year earlier to $533 million. 

“Our growth is powered by AI demand spanning our laser chips and optical transceivers inside data centers, as well as the interconnected long-haul networks that link them,” Lumentum CEO Michael Hurlston said on an earnings call in November. He said 60% of the company’s sales now come from cloud and AI infrastructure.

Revenue is expected to rise 58% for the fiscal year ending in June, but analysts see a slowdown from there to growth of 32% and 15% in the next two years, according to LSEG.

Western Digital is one of three major hard drive manufacturers, along with Seagate and Toshiba. Shares of the 55-year-old company are up 296% this year.

In addition to computing power, AI companies need increasing amounts of space to store applications and other data. In short, data centers need hard drives.

While Western Digital makes solid-state hard drives, which use chips to store data, the company is best known for its hard disk drives, which use spinning discs to store terabytes or more of data.

“Data is the fuel that powers AI, and it is HDDs that provide the most reliable, scalable and cost-effective data storage solution,” CEO Irving Tan said in October on an earnings call. He cited an example of a hospital that’s using an AI that analyzes 7 billion images.

In the most recent quarter, revenue rose 27% to $2.82 billion. The company says that selling more storage for data centers will improve profitability because AI companies need larger, more expensive hard drives.

Revenue is expected to increase about 23% in fiscal 2026, with growth slowing to 13% in 2027.

In February, Western Digital spun out its flash business as Sandisk, which now has a market cap of about $35 billion, more than half the value of Western Digital.

Micron is one of three major memory producers, alongside Samsung and SK Hynix, but the only one based in the U.S.

Artificial intelligence servers need a lot of memory to store and process massive AI models. Chips from Nvidia or Advanced Micro Devices come with scores of gigabytes of the most advanced memory, called high-bandwidth memory. The chipmakers are taking all the memory production capacity, leading to a worldwide shortage and driving prices higher.

Micron blew away Wall Street estimates for sales and earnings in its quarterly report last week, and the stock is now up 228% for the year.

Sumit Sadana, Micron’s business chief, said the company was “more than sold out” of its memory chips. In December, it even shuttered its consumer-focused line of memory and solid-state drives to save supply for AI.

Analysts from Morgan Stanley said in a December note that Micron’s results showed the best revenue and profit upside in the “history of the U.S. semis industry” — aside from Nvidia.

Revenue is expected to almost double in the year ending in August, before dramatically slowing to 24% in fiscal 2027 and less than 1% in 2028, according to LSEG.

Seagate, founded nine years after Western Digital, is also benefiting from booming demand for storage. The stock is up 228% this year.

Sales rose 21% to $2.63 billion in the company’s fiscal third quarter, which ended Oct. 3. The company said at the time that 80% of its sales go to the data center market.

“There is no question that AI is reshaping hard drive demand by elevating the economic value of data and data storage,” CEO Dave Mosley said on a call with analysts.

Seagate is unlikely to have extra hard drives in inventory, Bank of America analysts wrote in November, as any additional shipments will get claimed quickly. The analysts also noted that customers are signing build-to-order contracts with firm volume and price commitments.

“The extra units are typically purchased by hyperscale or other mass capacity customers,” wrote the analysts, who recommend buying the stock.

Seagate’s trajectory looks similar to Western Digital. Analysts expect 21% revenue growth this fiscal year, followed by increases of about 15% and 6% in the next two years, according to LSEG.

Celestica, founded in 1994 as an IBM subsidiary, makes switches that connect networks together and manage the data and traffic flowing through them.

The stock is up 213% this year.

The company sells many of its switches to the biggest AI buyers. Sales rose 28% in the third quarter to $3.19 billion. Analysts expect revenue growth to climb from 26% this year to 33% in 2026 and 34% in 2027, according to LSEG.

Celestica CEO Robert Mionis said on an earnings call in October that a hyperscaler recently approached the company to build parts to connect liquid-cooled rack-scale computers for AI, and said mass production is scheduled to begin next year.

One boon for Celestica is surging demand for custom chips called ASICs, which are less flexible than GPUs but can be cheaper to operate for specific AI applications.

“Our largest and fastest-growing market presence is within AI data centers, supporting high-performance networking and custom ASIC AI/ML compute platforms,” Mionis said.

Analysts at Goldman Sachs wrote in a note Friday that Celestica supplies parts for Google’s ASIC.

“The company should benefit in 2026 from being the leading provider of Google TPU rack level solutions,” the analysts wrote.

WATCH: Expect a drive towards efficiencies in ai in 2026

This is CNBC’s Morning Squawk newsletter. Subscribe here to receive future editions in your inbox.

Here are five key things investors need to know to start the trading day:

The U.S. economy expanded more than economists expected, the Commerce Department said in a government shutdown-delayed report.

Here’s what to know:

• The U.S. economy grew 4.3% in the third quarter, according to an initial reading.
• Consumers appear resilient, as spending expanded 3.5% in the third quarter after rising 2.5% in the second quarter.
• The Commerce Department’s initial read of economic growth over the summer comes after a consumer sentiment report shows more pessimism about the economy.
• Holiday retail spending rose 4.2% this season, driven by e-commerce and electronics, according to a preliminary Visa report. Meanwhile, 37% of Americans racked up holiday debt this year, at an average of $1,223 — up from $1,181 last year, LendingTree said.
• The GDP report was delayed almost two months because of the government shutdown and was enough to alarm investors into thinking that the Fed is less likely to lower interest rates in early 2026.
• Follow live market updates here.

Stock futures and Treasury yields were little changed Wednesday morning after the S&P 500 hit another record as investors shook off concerns that stronger-than-expected GDP growth would chill the Fed’s plans to lower interest rates. Tech stocks like Alphabet, Nvidia, Broadcom and Amazon buoyed the market.

Precious metals held onto their luster, continuing a record rally. Across the pond, BP agreed to sell a 65% stake in its lubricants business Castrol to Stonepeak for $6 billion, months after the oil giant sought a buyer for the unit.

U.S. stock markets will close at 1 p.m. ET for Christmas Eve, while bond markets are set to close at 2 p.m.

The Trump administration said it will start garnishing the wages of student loan borrowers in default in early January. It would mark the first time student borrowers’ paychecks have been at risk since the beginning of the Covid pandemic, when collections were halted.

Starting the week of Jan. 7, the Education Department expects around 1,000 defaulted student loan borrowers to receive notices of administrative wage garnishment, a spokesperson said. More than 5 million student loan borrowers are currently in default, the Education Department said earlier this year.

The U.S. plans to increase tariffs on Chinese semiconductor imports in June 2027, the Trump administration said in a Federal Register filing. Until then, the initial tariff rate on semiconductor imports from China will be zero for 18 months, according to the filing from the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative.

The agency said in an investigation that started a year ago that China is engaging in unfair trade practices in the industry. The decision to delay new tariffs for at least 18 months signals that the Trump administration is seeking to cool any trade hostilities between the U.S. and China.

Enterprise software giant ServiceNow will acquire cybersecurity startup Armis in a cash deal valued at $7.75 billion, part of a plan to boost its cybersecurity capabilities in the age of artificial intelligence.

“ServiceNow will have the only AI control tower that drives workflow, action and business outcomes across all of these environments,” CEO Bill McDermott told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street.”

Self-driving in the dark? We’re getting there. Alphabet-owned Waymo said it’s updating its fleet so its vehicles are better prepared to respond during future outages, days after a blackout in San Francisco caused Waymo to pause its driverless car service.

— CNBC’s Pia Singh, Annie Nova, Jessica Dickler, Luke Fountain, Samantha Subin, Kai Nicol-Schwarz, Jeff Cox, Fred Imbert, Kif Leswing and Ari Levy contributed to this report. Melodie Warner edited this edition.