Amazon.com shares jumped 12 percent in premarket trading Friday and Apple fell 7 percent, as investors sorted this week's Big Tech earnings into artificial-intelligence winners and losers and Seoul's Kospi index closed almost 18 percent higher on rallies in chipmakers SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics.
The divergent moves cap a week in which markets shifted from broad enthusiasm about the AI buildout to a company-by-company reckoning. Hyperscalers whose cloud growth appears to justify their capital spending have been rewarded; those whose spending has outpaced revenue have been punished. Apple, which had traded this year as an alternative to that trade because it has spent comparatively little on AI infrastructure, was penalized instead for a shortage of the memory chips the buildout itself has made scarce.
What shifted
Amazon reported that revenue at Amazon Web Services rose 37 percent from a year earlier in the second quarter, the strongest expansion since 2021 and the segment Wall Street watches most closely for signs of AI demand. The company simultaneously raised its 2026 capital-expenditure target to $220 billion, from a prior forecast of $200 billion. AWS's growth "is a clear indicator that its infrastructure investments are meeting market demand rather than outpacing it," Tracy Woo, principal analyst at Forrester, wrote in a note Thursday.
Apple's report cut the other way. The company beat expectations on earnings, revenue and iPhone sales for the June quarter but guided current-quarter revenue growth of 9 percent to 11 percent, below the 12 percent analysts polled by LSEG had projected. Apple attributed the shortfall to "supply constraints," a shortage of memory chips that has already prompted price increases on the Mac and iPad and, analysts expect, on the iPhone later this year.
On the Street
The split extended Thursday's pattern from a day earlier. Microsoft, whose Azure business crossed a $100 billion annualized run rate for the first time Wednesday, rallied 15 percent Thursday. Meta Platforms, which disclosed its lowest quarterly free cash flow in at least five years and lifted its 2026 spending target for the second time in three months, sank 8 percent. Alphabet reported negative free cash flow for the first time in its history as a public company, on $118 billion in revenue.
Amazon closed about 4 percent higher Thursday and had been trading up only about 4 percent year-to-date before Friday's premarket surge, a laggard among the big five. Apple has risen 23 percent in 2026 on the thesis that its restrained capex insulated the company from a spending cycle Wall Street increasingly views as circular.
Seoul reverses
The AWS number rippled hardest through Seoul, where SK Hynix, a principal supplier of high-bandwidth memory to Nvidia, closed almost 30 percent higher and Samsung Electronics gained 28 percent. The moves partly reversed a three-day rout that had wiped hundreds of billions of dollars off the Kospi and tripped the Korean bourse's circuit breaker Tuesday, when SK Hynix fell 15 percent intraday after a Wall Street Journal report that Nvidia was in talks to backstop about $250 billion for OpenAI's Ohio data-center project. South Korean regulators introduced measures during the week aimed at curbing the sell-off. The Kospi remains more than 50 percent above its end-2025 level despite the round trip. Tokyo and Taipei also closed higher.
Cook's last call
Apple's guidance was delivered on the last earnings call to be hosted by Timothy D. Cook as chief executive. Cook told analysts the company was banking on user response to an overhaul of Siri, its voice assistant, being rebuilt with help from Google's Gemini chatbot, and confirmed Apple already plans to charge for heavier use of the new tool. "We're off-the-charts excited about Siri AI," Cook said. "We do believe there will be people who want to use it – a lot."
Google said last week that 950 million people now use Gemini at least monthly, triple the number a year earlier.
The counterpoint
Friday's rally does not erase the week's larger arithmetic. Alphabet's second-quarter free cash flow was negative for the first time since it went public. Meta's $784 million in free cash flow on $61 billion of revenue was among the company's lowest on record; its Reality Labs unit lost nearly $9 billion in the first half. The five largest U.S. technology companies plan to spend more than $1 trillion combined on AI infrastructure this year, and no consumer AI product has yet produced revenue meaningful against that number. Today's dossier draws entirely from wire and center-tier business reporting; a bearish buy-side voice on whether AWS's growth vindicates the industry's capex is absent from the record.
What's next
Nvidia's fiscal second-quarter earnings will supply the next test of the demand thesis Amazon's cloud number rebuilt on Thursday. In Seoul, regulators will decide whether to extend the measures they adopted during this week's rout.