In July, Apple posted a 15.2% cumulative share price increase from the close of June 30 to the close of July 30, ranking second only to Microsoft among large-cap U.S. tech stocks and outperforming Meta and Alphabet. This rally occurred despite Apple being historically the "slowest" major tech firm in AI, having released Apple Intelligence in June 2024 and postponed its new Siri to this year. In 2025, the Nasdaq 100 ETF rose by 20.77%, while Apple’s increase was only 9.05%. Apple’s capital expenditure on a cash basis was about 10 billion U.S. dollars in the 12 months ending June 2026, roughly one-tenth of Microsoft’s 115.9 billion, Meta’s 89.3 billion, Alphabet’s 132.4 billion, and Amazon’s 167.4 billion U.S. dollars. Apple trains mostly small on-device models and partners with Google’s Gemini globally, and with Alibaba’s Tongyi and Baidu in China, to avoid bearing full cloud infrastructure costs. On July 31 after earnings, Apple’s share price fell by 7.4% due to factors including memory chips, while Microsoft and Amazon surged on strong cloud performance. The July trend shows the capital market re-evaluating AI infrastructure investments, giving Apple’s less capital-intensive AI approach a chance to attract investors.