Apple Set to Shed Close to 500 Billion Dollars as Amazon Jumps on Cloud Growth

Two of the largest United States companies reported strong quarters and received opposite verdicts from investors. Apple was set to lose close to 500 billion dollars in market value after warning that component shortages would hold its forecast below expectations. Its shares fell about 8 percent despite strong results for the June quarter. Amazon, by contrast, rose sharply after its cloud division posted its strongest growth in more than four years.

The cause is a single supply squeeze producing two outcomes. The AI buildout has absorbed so much advanced-chip and memory capacity that Apple cannot secure enough components for its devices, which threatens to shrink the personal-computer and smartphone markets this year. The same scarcity appears as demand at Amazon Web Services, whose revenue growth ran ahead of forecasts and led the company to raise its planned capital spending for 2026 to about 220 billion dollars, from a prior 200 billion.

Investors read the results as evidence that infrastructure spending is meeting demand rather than outrunning it, at least for the firms that sell computing capacity. That is a narrower bet than the broad AI rally of prior quarters, and it leaves companies whose profits depend on cheap, abundant hardware exposed to the shortage their suppliers are profiting from.

The divergence tests the concentration risk that has built up in global equity indices. When a handful of AI-linked names drive most of the gains, a re-sorting of winners and losers inside that group can move the whole index even when overall earnings are healthy.