Overview
- Pershing Square’s Q2 filings show it trimmed roughly 25% of its Amazon stake, sold its entire Alphabet position, and bought about 553,000 additional Microsoft shares to make Microsoft the largest AI-exposed holding.
- After the moves Pershing held roughly 6.2 million Microsoft shares valued near $2.3 billion, representing about 11.9% of the portfolio, and retained a sizable Amazon position of more than 8.56 million shares worth about $2 billion or 10.5% of the portfolio.
- Ackman’s letter and Pershing reports cite Microsoft’s fiscal strength — about $100 billion in Azure revenue for the year and roughly $19.6 billion in free cash flow — as a defensive complement to AI growth.
- Pershing kept Amazon exposure because it expects AWS demand to rise even as Amazon ramps capital spending to about $220 billion to build data centers, noting AWS revenue growth has accelerated to over 30% in 2026 and Amazon retail unit volume hit about 15% growth in the prior quarter.
- The trades highlight a central investor tradeoff: backing scale and near-term cash generation at Microsoft versus backing AWS’s market-share gains that require heavy AI infrastructure capex, and they make Pershing’s concentrated view a signal other large investors will watch closely.