Apple and Amazon both topped Wall Street estimates in their latest quarterly reports, released within hours of each other on July 30. But the two companies got there in very different ways: one through hardware demand, the other largely through a paper gain on an AI investment.
Apple: iPhone carries the quarter, Services comes up short
According to Apple’s recent announcement, earnings for the third quarter of the year are $109.4 billion, which represents an increase of 16% compared to previous year’s results, therefore surpassing analysts’ expectations of $108.7 billion. The company managed to increase sales of its iPhone more than 21%, reaching $54.25 billion, and sales of Mac also show good results with a 29% growth, making a total of $10.35 billion. Despite the strong performance, it is worth mentioning that the earnings report includes some nonregular income attributed to a refund of tariffs approved by the Supreme Court earlier this year.
At the same time, notably, the Services segment of the company, which includes support for offerings such as the App Store and other subscription-based products, reached $30.74 billion, which is less than the expected $31.22 billion; however, this means that the segment has been able to show growth for the whole 11 quarters.
The quarter also marked Tim Cook’s final earnings call as chief executive. John Ternus, Apple’s hardware engineering chief, takes over as CEO on September 1, 2026, with Cook moving into the role of executive chairman.
Amazon: a $53.4 billion Anthropic stake reshapes the bottom line
As for Amazon, the results of the second quarter of 2026 look even better. Second-quarter net sales reached $200.6 billion, topping the $196.47 billion consensus and crossing $200 billion in a single quarter for the first time. AWS, Amazon’s cloud computing division, grew 37% year over year to $42.2 billion (its fastest pace in 18 quarters by the way) and advertising revenue rose 26% to $19.8 billion.
However, the figure drawing the most attention from a fintech lens sits below those operating numbers. Amazon’s profits soared to $62.6 billion, more than three times the amount of the same period last year and equating to diluted earnings per share of $5.75 as opposed to Wall Street’s prediction of 1.82. The figures were disclosed to include pre-tax non-operating income of $53.4 billion as a result of investments in Anthropic, the firm that designed Claude, its chatbot. However, without this remarkable result, Amazon’s core income would have been $27.5 billion, which represents a growth of 43% compared to the previous year, but less than half of the headline figure.
The story of Amazon’s continuous investment into Anthropic was initiated in September 2023 when the tech giant allocated $4 billion to build up a strategic partnership based on artificial intelligence. At that time, the company invested $1.25 billion and later added $2.75 billion in March 2024. Additionally, Anthropic has partnered with Amazon Web Services (AWS) by choosing this company to become its cloud provider. Furthermore, Claude creators used AWS Trainium and Inferentia AI chips to train and deploy its LLMs and agreed to making its foundation models widely available through Amazon Bedrock.
Once again, in 2024, Amazon invested another $4 billion making its total investment $8 billion. The firm remained a minority shareholder at that point, though. The partnership expanded further in late 2024, when Amazon invested another $4 billion, bringing its total investment to $8 billion while remaining a minority shareholder. In 2026, the companies announced a new phase of collaboration, with Amazon committing $5 billion immediately and the option to invest up to an additional $20 billion in the future. The expanded agreement also includes Anthropic’s long-term commitment to AWS infrastructure and deeper collaboration on next-generation AI systems.
Why this matters for fintech
The two reports frame a financial results split worth tracking. Apple’s beat came from selling more physical devices; its recurring-revenue Services arm, often held up as its most defensible margin driver, actually fell short of expectations this quarter.
Amazon’s headline profit, by contrast, was carried substantially by a mark-to-market gain on a private AI-company stake rather than retail or even cloud operations, even as AWS itself delivered genuine, fundamentals-driven growth. As we know, all Big Tech companies (i.e. Meta, Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet) have dramatically increased their capital expenditures last year, with most money going to unprecedented AI infrastructure buildout across the tech industry. Now, we start to see some of those investments paying out.
As AI labs raise capital at increasingly large valuations, gains like this are becoming material enough to swing reported earnings at some of the world’s largest public companies — a dynamic that blurs the line between operating performance and investment-portfolio marks.
