Both companies beat on the top and bottom lines on Thursday evening. Amazon closed the regular session at $235.50 and traded up to roughly $252 after hours, a gain of about 7% at the print and 9% at the peak. Apple closed at $333.43 and traded down to roughly $312, a decline of more than 6%. The divergence had almost nothing to do with the quality of the two beats and almost everything to do with a single input cost that both companies discussed at length: DRAM.

Three stories landed within hours of each other this week, and together they say more about the AI buildout than any single earnings call. BlackRock is leading a debt sale exceeding $12 billion to finance Meta’s new data center in El Paso, Texas. In a related move, Meta has signed a lease for a separate BlackRock-backed data center project in Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, on the supply side, TSMC is preparing to raise prices on both advanced and mature process nodes by as much as 10% in 2027, with an additional 10-15% premium layered on top for customers who exceed their original order forecasts. And Microsoft has signed a multibillion-dollar agreement with Mistral to build European data centers while folding Mistral’s models into Foundry, Copilot Studio, and Azure Local.

IBM closed down 25.2% at $217.07 on July 14, the steepest single-day decline in the company’s history and the worst drop in records that run back to 1968 — worse than the 23.7% collapse of October 1987. Roughly $67 billion in market value evaporated on a preliminary second-quarter print that missed revenue by 3.7%. That gap between the size of the miss and the size of the reaction is the entire story. The market did not sell a quarter. It repriced the forward earnings stream.

xAI is running its 550,000-GPU Colossus fleet at roughly 11% model FLOPs utilization. An internal memo from infrastructure lead Michael Nicolls confirmed the figure and set a target of 50% — a number that sits at the high end of an industry range where even the best operators, Meta and Google, are only achieving 43–46%. For a company that built the world’s largest AI supercomputer in 122 days, the software stack is still catching up to the hardware.

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