Apple Loses Close to 500 Billion Dollars as Memory Shortage Splits the Big Technology Trade

Apple shares fell close to 10 percent after the company guided for September-quarter revenue growth of only 9 to 11 percent, a sharp slowdown from the 16 percent it just reported. The decline reduced Apple's market value by nearly 500 billion dollars and returned the title of world's most valuable company to Nvidia. Outgoing chief executive Tim Cook, speaking on his final earnings call, called shortages of advanced memory chips "very significant" and said Apple had limited means to address them.

The cause lies further down the supply chain. The construction of artificial-intelligence data centers has created enormous demand for advanced memory, and consumer-electronics makers are losing access to the components they need to build phones, laptops, and tablets. The same shortage that is hurting Apple is benefiting the companies that supply computing power.

Amazon showed the opposite outcome. Its shares rose about 9 percent in after-hours trading as Amazon Web Services, the company's cloud division, grew 37 percent from a year earlier, and quarterly revenue passed 200 billion dollars. The company then raised planned 2026 capital spending to about 220 billion dollars, an increase it tied partly to higher memory costs.

The divergence matters for how investors judge the surge in artificial-intelligence spending. Amazon reported measurable revenue to weigh against its capital spending, the evidence skeptics have been demanding. Apple's warning showed that the same infrastructure expansion imposes real costs on companies that consume chips rather than sell computing power.