Tonight Highlights: Amazon Earnings Bolster AI Confidence as U.S. Futures Rise; Apple Drops Nearly 8% Pre-Market
U.S. stock index futures pushed higher on Friday, buoyed by optimistic second-quarter results from Amazon, with Nasdaq 100 futures advancing roughly 0.8%. European markets similarly moved upward in tandem.
Amazon surged over 10% in pre-market trading after delivering a top-line beat for Q2, underpinned by robust momentum in AWS cloud operations that reaffirmed Wall Street's confidence in sustained enterprise AI infrastructure spending.
Conversely, Apple slipped nearly 8% pre-market. While its fiscal third-quarter revenue topped estimates—highlighted by a 22% jump in iPhone sales—a miss in Services revenue weighed heavily on shares.
Meta edged up 1% pre-market following a nearly 8% plunge during Thursday's regular trading session.
The pre-market advance follows a sharp Wall Street rebound on Thursday, led by Microsoft's massive 16% surge on better-than-expected Azure growth.
The cloud beat triggered a broad rally across semiconductor equities, driving the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index up over 8%, with memory names extending gains on Friday as Micron climbed over 3% pre-market.
"Investors are recalibrating expectations around Federal Reserve rate cuts, draining the excess liquidity that previously fueled speculative, momentum-driven market behavior," said Richard Bernstein, Head of Global Macro and Customized Investments at Janus Henderson Investors. "As market participants increasingly prioritize improving fundamentals over hype-driven momentum, market leadership is broadening beyond the 'Magnificent Seven'."
In Asia, South Korea's KOSPI index roared back with a single-day surge of over 15%, driven by massive gains in memory giants SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics. Japan's Nikkei 225 jumped over 3%, while Australia's S&P/ASX 200 closed up 0.27%.
Corporate News
Apple CEO Tim Cook Addresses Memory Chip Shortage: Evaluating All Sourcing Options
Speaking on Apple's post-earnings conference call on July 30, CEO Tim Cook stated that the company is actively evaluating options to manage rising memory component costs.
Cook disclosed that memory procurement expenses rose across both the March and June quarters and are expected to scale further in the September quarter, though offset partially by beginning inventory benefits and cost reductions in non-memory components.
Cook emphasized that the DRAM market remains concentrated among three key suppliers, noting that additional suppliers would improve supply chain elasticity and favorably impact pricing.
Amazon Discloses $13.7 Billion Q2 Capital Outlay for OpenAI Series C Preferred Stock
Regulatory filings released July 31 show that Amazon committed $28.7 billion to OpenAI’s Series C preferred stock over the six-month period ending June 30, with $13.7 billion deployed from its capital commitment during the second quarter alone.
Anthropic Reports AI Models Accidental Breach of Three Production Systems During Testing
On July 30, AI lab Anthropic disclosed findings from an extensive internal audit initiated after OpenAI revealed its models had breached sandboxed environments into Hugging Face infrastructure. Anthropic revealed that due to misconfigured testing pipelines with a third-party partner, cybersecurity evaluation environments for its Claude series were inadvertently connected to the public internet.
The models mistook real-world networks for simulated benchmarks, penetrating systems belonging to three organizations. The incident involved Opus 4.7, Mythos 5, and an unreleased internal test model; Mythos 5 uploaded a malicious package to an open-source repository, while the newer internal model automatically halted execution upon detecting external network access.
Anthropic has paused the evaluation pipelines, assisted affected organizations with remediation, and emphasized that the breach stemmed from environment configuration errors rather than intentional model escape.
Sony Group Q1 Net Profit Jumps 32.1% YoY to 342.16 Billion Yen
Sony Group posted first-quarter financial results for FY2026 (ended June 30, 2026), reporting revenue of 2.84 trillion yen (+8.2% YoY) and operating profit of 476.50 billion yen (+40.2% YoY). Net profit attributable to Sony Group shareholders rose 32.1% year-over-year to 342.16 billion yen, up from 259.03 billion yen in the prior-year period.
ExxonMobil Reports Q2 Net Income of $14.5 Billion
ExxonMobil posted Q2 2026 net income of $14.5 billion ($3.48 per share). Adjusted earnings came in at $14.7 billion ($3.52 per share vs. $3.54 consensus estimate). The board declared a third-quarter dividend of $1.03 per share.