Apple CEO Tim Cook and John Ternus, Apple’s next CEO, attend the annual Allen and Co. Sun Valley Media and Technology Conference at Sun Valley Resort in Sun Valley, Idaho, July 9, 2026.
Brendan McDermid | Reuters
Apple On Tuesday, he briefly reached a market capitalization of $5 trillion for the first time, a day after his death. Nvidia to become the most valuable publicly traded company.
Shares of the iPhone maker, which reports quarterly results Thursday, have surged 25% this year, outpacing its large-cap peers. The stock hit a high of $342.89 on Tuesday before falling slightly.
While hyperscalers — Alphabet, Amazon, Meta And Microsoft – are collectively investing hundreds of billions of dollars in capital spending this year for the development of their artificial intelligence, Apple has kept its capital expenditures low and uses Google’s cloud infrastructure and AI technology.
Apple lagged its trillion-dollar market peers last year, as investors worried the company was missing out on the AI boom by reining in investments and delaying the long-awaited rollout of an improved Siri, which will launch this fall alongside new iPhone hardware. But the situation has reversed recently amid concerns that aggressive tech investors are accumulating debt and turning their cash flows negative without a clear path to big returns.
THE debate The future of AI is rooted in the fight between Apple and chipmaker Nvidia for market cap supremacy. Nvidia, whose graphics processing units power most major AI models, became the first company to hit the $5 trillion mark in October, but the stock has been a relative laggard this year, gaining just 6%.
Meanwhile, Apple shares have rallied, despite rising device prices resulting from the global memory shortage.
Tuesday, Apple Upgrade announceda new program that will allow US customers to rent iPhones and other products, instead of purchasing them outright. Last monththe company raised prices for MacBooks and iPads, its first formal measure to increase memory and storage costs to consumers after the CEO Tim Cook said the increases had become inevitable.
Thursday’s earnings call will be Cook’s last as CEO, with John Ternus is expected to take over on September 1st.
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