US stock futures pointed higher Friday. The move was led by technology, and it was driven by a single theme: earnings.

Contracts on the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 climbed about 1.1% to 28,552.00 in premarket trading. S&P 500 futures added 0.47% to 7,507.75, while Dow Jones Industrial Average futures rose 0.53% to 52,660.00. The gains extend a rebound that has run through the busiest week of second-quarter earnings season.

The story of the morning is divergence. Investors are no longer buying “Big Tech” as a single block. They are separating the companies pouring money into artificial-intelligence infrastructure from those that are not.

Amazon and Apple move in opposite directions

Amazon was the clear winner. The stock jumped about 12% in premarket trading, changing hands near $263.80, after Amazon Web Services reported revenue growth of 37% year-over-year in the second quarter — its strongest expansion since 2021. AWS is the profit engine that funds Amazon’s AI buildout, and the reacceleration reassured investors who had worried that cloud growth was stalling.

Apple went the other way. Shares fell about 7%, near $309.25 in premarket, even though earnings, revenue and iPhone sales all beat Wall Street estimates. The problem was the outlook. Apple issued weaker-than-expected guidance for the current quarter, citing supply constraints, and flagged renewed pressure in its Chinese business, where local competitors are gaining ground.

The contrast is the season in miniature. As with Amazon, Microsoft rallied more than 15% on Wednesday after Azure cloud revenue topped $100 billion for the first time and grew 43%. Meta, by comparison, sank about 9% despite a 28% jump in revenue, as investors balked at its spending plans. The market is picking sides, and right now it is siding with cloud and AI infrastructure over consumer hardware and pure advertising.

The $725 billion question

Underneath the single-stock moves sits one enormous number. Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta together plan to spend roughly $725 billion on capital expenditures in 2026, up about 77% from last year, most of it aimed at AI data centers and the chips inside them.

That spending is now the axis on which these stocks turn. When a hyperscaler shows the AI investment is translating into cloud revenue — as Amazon and Microsoft did this week — the stock is rewarded. When investors see only the bill, as with Meta, the stock is punished. This is the same concentration risk that has made a handful of names decisive for the whole index, a dynamic we examined in FOMO, TINA, FOMU: should you stay invested in the S&P 500?. For investors who want the index without that top-heavy exposure, there are 3 S&P 500 ETFs without the “Magnificent 7” worth knowing.

A cooler inflation backdrop

The earnings rally has a helpful macro tailwind. The Personal Consumption Expenditures price index — the Federal Reserve’s preferred inflation gauge — cooled in June, with the core measure rising just 0.1% on the month. As the Bureau of Economic Analysis reported, “personal income increased $54.9 billion” (0.2%) in June while consumer spending rose 0.3%, a picture of an economy that is slowing gently rather than stalling. Softer inflation keeps the door open to Fed rate cuts later this year, and lower rates are especially supportive for the long-duration growth stocks that dominate the Nasdaq.

Traders looking past the mega-caps for value have been rotating toward cheaper AI plays, a theme we covered in 5 undervalued AI stocks that beat the S&P 500 by 67%.

What to Watch for the Open

  • Amazon and Apple at 9:30 a.m. ET: premarket moves of this size often fade or extend at the open. Watch whether AWS enthusiasm holds and whether dip-buyers step in for Apple.
  • Month-end flows: today is the last trading day of July. Portfolio rebalancing can amplify or blunt the earnings moves in the final hour.
  • The 10-year Treasury yield: a lower yield would reinforce the bid for tech. A jump would test it.
  • Next catalysts: the July jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics lands Friday, August 7, and the next PCE reading follows on August 26. Both will shape the Fed’s September decision.

The takeaway for the open is simple. This is no longer a rising tide that lifts all of Big Tech. It is a market that reads each balance sheet on its own — and, for now, pays up for the companies building the AI economy rather than the ones simply selling into it.