They’re not called the Magnificent Seven for nothing.

This week brought big earnings reports for Big Tech, and the cohort didn’t disappoint. On Wednesday, Meta and Microsoft obliterated Wall Street’s expectations, followed by similarly strong showings for Amazon and Apple on Thursday. The reports made one thing clear: Big Tech’s big AI bet is already paying off, which explains why it can’t help but double down.

Spare No Capital Expense

Let’s start with the top-line figures: Each company beat Wall Street’s revenue expectations for the quarter, with Amazon’s $167 billion leading the group, followed by Apple’s $94 billion, Microsoft’s $76 billion, and Meta’s measly $47.5 billion bringing up the rear. Profitability soared across the board, led by Meta’s 36% year-over-year increase in net income. Microsoft, meanwhile, reported a group-leading net income north of $27 billion over the three months. In sum: Each company just executed a monster quarter, virtually anyway you slice it.

While certainly not surprising, it’s likely more than enough to solidify their rock-solid standing as stock market cornerstones. Microsoft’s market cap crept above $4 trillion on Thursday, putting it in league with Nvidia. Combined, Apple, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft account for a staggering 20% of the S&P 500 (Nvidia’s about another 7%, while Alphabet’s about 4%). The group’s presence is looming so large that asset management group Research Affiliates chairman Rob Arnott told the Financial Times earlier this week that investors are pricing the companies “as if they will have no competition in the future.”

When it comes to an ability to spend and invest money, these companies already have no competition. And, clearly, the juice has already been worth the squeeze:

• Microsoft is planning a record $30 billion in capital spending in its current quarter (the first of its fiscal year 2026) to build out AI data centers. That’s to power its Azure cloud business, now a major AI compute provider, which pulled in $75 billion in sales for all of the 2025 fiscal year. Translation: The company may be losing its grip on ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, but it’s firmly entrenched in the AI ecosystem anyway.
• One of those Azure clients? Meta, which raised the lower end of its 2025 capital spending forecast by $2 billion, to a range of $66 billion to $72 billion, to continue investing in AI. In the meantime, AI is helping Meta juice its ad sales, which still account for about 98% of the company’s total revenue.

Amazon’s capital expenditures already soared north of $30 billion this most recent quarter, coming in above projections.

(Apple) Core Business: Apple may well be the big winner of the week, by virtue of not being as big a loser as some feared. The company continues to fall behind in the AI race, recently losing a fourth key team member to Mark Zuckerberg’s AI Superintelligence, and its longtime manufacturing presence in China puts it at the center of the trade war. But fears about that trade war spurred huge sales for its devices in the most recent quarter as customers looked to get ahead of tariffs. Now, those duties may never come. Apple’s India plants have become the leading supplier of iPhones to the US, and while the White House has slapped most Indian exports with a 25% tariff, it appears smartphones and other electronic devices have scored an exemption.

None of this was by design. Less than two years ago, in December 2023, software giant Adobe abandoned a $20 billion acquisition of Figma, the maker of cloud-based design tools for building website and app interfaces. The deal unraveled after antitrust regulators in the US and Europe expressed such vociferous concern that Adobe didn’t even bother with seeking formal approval.

Figma shareholders ought to thank them: The company’s shares soared 250% in their New York Stock Exchange debut yesterday, yielding a market capitalization of $47 billion, or more than double Adobe’s offer. Other companies flirting with initial public offerings (IPO), like a certain Swedish fintech, may soon follow the encouraging developments.

Wake-Up Call

The IPO market, as you probably know, entered a bear-like hibernation after its 2021 peak. Central banks started hiking interest rates to lance white-hot inflation, the knock-on effect being an increased cost of capital (which makes it harder to borrow and finance growth). There was hope this slumbering bear would emerge from its cave this year, soothed by the honeyed business outlook of the new administration. Instead, the first half of 2025 ended up meh.

On the one hand, the US saw 109 IPOs, the most in the first half of a year since 2021. But the proceeds (the actual money raised in those offerings) fell to $17.1 billion from $18.8 billion in the first half of 2024, according to an EY analysis. To emphasize just how far things have fallen, the first half of 2021 saw 219 US IPOs that brought in $85.1 billion. Much of the gap can be explained by economic uncertainty due to the Trump administration’s saber-rattling about tariffs, which has left the Federal Reserve hesitant to cut rates so far this year. But Figma’s debut on Thursday was the latest in a series of encouraging signs:

• On top of the software developer’s sterling debut, recent weeks saw online bank Chime and stablecoin issuer Circle debut (the former up 27% from Chime’s $27 June IPO price, the latter up over 490%). AI data center company CoreWeave, which debuted in March, is up almost 200%.
• So take it as no surprise that buy-now-pay-later fintech Klarna, which filed for an IPO in March but punted amid the tariff uncertainty in the months to follow, is considering listing as early as next month, according to sources who spoke to Bloomberg News. The outlet reported that the recent run of strong debuts is a factor in Klarna’s thinking; EY’s research bolsters the case for momentum, noting that June accounted for nine of the 16 IPOs that raised more than $50 million in the second quarter.

What M&A Has to Say: There are signs that another core part of corporate activity, mergers and acquisitions, is also proving resilient amid escalating tariffs. In the first half of the year, the value of announced M&A deals reached $1.2 trillion, the highest in three years, S&P Global research said this week. “As markets have largely shrugged off initial tariff uncertainties with multiple pauses, deals have resumed relatively quickly,” wrote the ratings agency. Listings could follow suit, as “the IPO market appears poised to build on recent momentum,” according to EY’s analysis (especially if trade negotiations stay subdued compared to a dramatic April that sent Klarna into a hibernation cave of its own for a few months).

America’s two largest oil companies, Exxon Mobil and Chevron, will report earnings before the bell this morning, and analysts expect profits at both to come up a few barrels short. They may, in fact, be the worst since 2021, when the pandemic converted a big share of human behavior requiring energy consumption into pajama-clad work-from-home days at the kitchen table.

Rather than jockeying for an advantage in their weakened state, the two longtime rivals are set to work together more and more on major exploration initiatives following a tense legal standoff earlier this year that has practically made them frenemies.

Thicker than Water

Oil, like blood, runs thicker than water and, also like blood, Exxon-Chevron’s rivalry can be traced back to the same family. The two companies are a product of the Supreme Court’s 1911 breakup of industry titan John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, which justices ordered split up into 34 different entities at the height of the trust-busting Progressive Era.

As rivals, they also feel the same pain. In the second quarter, that came from the oil-exporting OPEC+ group of countries, which decided to sharply increase production in July — something they’ve agreed to continue this month. This helped push oil prices to four-year lows for large stretches of the three months from April to the end of June. Hence Wall Street’s consensus projection, compiled from analysts by data provider LSEG, that Exxon will report $6.7 billion in adjusted earnings for the quarter, down roughly a quarter year-over-year, and Chevron $3 billion, down roughly a third. Exxon, for one, already warned last month that it expects to take a $1.5 billion earnings hit in the quarter because of lower oil and gas prices. But, with both firms set to report a downbeat quarter, Chevron has moved its business into its best position in years, and Exxon is going to be forced to play along:

• Two weeks ago, in a massive boost to its future production and cash flow, Chevron closed its $53 billion acquisition of Hess after beating Exxon in arbitration. The deal means it will take over Hess’s 30% stake in a massive Guyana project — with some $1 trillion in reserves and a lucrative $30 per barrel break-even price — that’s operated by Exxon, which unsuccessfully argued it had the right to buy out its rival.
• But the situationship doesn’t end there. Last month, the two firms also led a $34 billion memorandum of understanding with Indonesia to work with the country’s state-run Pertamina to boost production and increase technology exchanges between the archipelago nation and US oil majors.

The two also have their biggest oil-producing operations in the southeastern US Permian Basin (over 60% of Exxon’s 1.9 million barrels of oil per day produced in the US come from the basin, and almost half of Chevron’s 1.8 million). Not to mention operations in Africa and Australia — all of which has revived talk of an eventual megamerger.

Hold the Selloff: In another sign of the sector’s downbeat quarter, British giant Shell reported a second quarter profit of $4.2 billion on Thursday, down almost a third and with low oil prices to (not) thank for it. But, as with Exxon and Chevron, analysts anticipated the dip, and Shell’s results beat estimates. Its shares even rose a tepid 0.7%, indicating investors are unlikely to punish firms for a quarter defined by volatile trade policy and geopolitical uncertainty. That’s likely to continue, if less dramatically: Prices were propped up early this week by Trump’s threats to further sanction Russia over its invasion of Ukraine, but eased Thursday after he announced trade talks with Mexico would be extended. Brent crude futures dropped 1% to $72.53 a barrel, while West Texas Intermediate futures fell 1% to $69.26. Both are well above the low-60s range they touched in May and June, which is expected to have chipped away at Exxon and Chevron’s earnings.