Amazon’s Cloud Unit To Run Apple’s MacOS System; Street Sees 21% Upside

Amazon’s cloud computing business announced that it will run Apple’s macOS workloads on its platform for the first time to allow developers building applications for Apple devices to create and test the apps remotely.

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Amazon’s (AMZN) Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Mac instances service will be built on Mac mini computers and will give developers creating apps for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, Apple TV, and Safari, access to run on-demand macOS workloads in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud.

“Our customers tell us they would love to have their Apple build environment integrated with AWS services,” said David Brown, Vice President of EC2, at AWS. “With EC2 Mac instances, developers can now provision and access on-demand macOS compute environments in AWS for the first time ever, so they can focus on creating groundbreaking apps for Apple’s industry-leading platforms, rather than procuring and managing the underlying infrastructure.”

A number of companies have already started working with AWS’s Macs, including global financial platform Intuit Inc., Amazon’s home security camera app Ring, and mobile cinema camera app FiLMiC Inc.

AWS said that EC2 Mac instances will use Mac mini computers with Intel’s eighth-generation 3.2GHz (4.6GHz turbo) Core i7 processors and 32 GiB of memory.

EC2 Mac instances are available now in the US, Europe and Asia-Pacific with more regions to come. AWS said EC2 Mac instances with Apple’s (AAPL) new M1 chips are already in the works, with a launch planned for 2021.

Companies like Amazon are weathering the COVID-19 crisis relatively well as the tech giant has been looking to expand its remote services to gain more market share as businesses and consumers shift their operations to cloud environments. Shares have been on a steady gaining streak, jumping a stellar 71% so far this year, with the average analyst price target of $3,819.89 implying an additional 21% upside potential is lying ahead in the coming 12 months.

Commenting on the upcoming holiday season, Truist Financial analyst Youssef Squali is “incrementally positive” on Amazon going into what the analyst forecasts called a “blockbuster” period driven by “outsized” growth in the US.

Squali, who reiterated a Buy rating on the stock with a $3,650 price target, expects US e-commerce to make up 42% of Amazon’s total gross merchandise volume versus 36% last year. The analyst reckons that Amazon will claim 42 cents of every $1 spent on e-commerce in North America.

In addition, the prospects for a “smoother” presidential transition and better outlook for fiscal 2021 coupled with the progress made on the launch of COVID-19 vaccines should help “dissipate the risk of major disruptions” and provide a catalyst for consumer spending, the analyst said.

Overall, AMZN scores a Strong Buy analyst consensus with 36 Buy ratings vs. only 1 Hold rating. (See Amazon stock analysis on TipRanks).