How Apple stock rode the AI rollercoaster to record highs in 1 chart
Apple's stock has had a bumpy ride this year. But it's been a lot more pleasant lately — so much so that shares posted their first record close in over a month during Thursday's session. In doing so, Apple stands out...
S&P 500 (SPY) Temmuz'da (DÜŞÜK) 730 Doları vuracak mı?
Here is a story making headlines in the economy: Apple's stock has had a bumpy ride this year. But it's been a lot more pleasant lately — so much so that shares posted their first record close in over a month during Thursday's session. In doing so, Apple stands out among the rest of the "Magnificent Seven.
" The other six members of the group — Amazon , Alphabet , Microsoft , Nvidia , Meta , and Tesla — are all well below their all-time closing highs. For some (Microsoft, Meta, and Tesla), you have to go all the way back to last year to find theirs. For the others (Amazon, Alphabet, and Nvidia), they topped out on various days in May before pulling back.
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5% year-to-date gain is also the best of the bunch (only Microsoft and Tesla are in the red in 2026). So, what makes Apple the outlier among these trillion-dollar-plus giants? Despite a modest pullback on Friday, why is it near its highs while the other stocks stare up at theirs?
The simple answer is that Wall Street is, finally, rewarding Apple for its low-cost approach to the artificial intelligence race. At the same time, the Street is rethinking how it values the other megacaps as customers prioritize efficient AI consumption, rather than a maximalist mindset. This shift from "tokenmaxxing" to token optimization — a token is the basic unit of AI computing — marks a new chapter in the generative AI boom, with clear ripple effects in the stock market.
Just look at the chart of Apple. To fully appreciate the love for Apple, at a time of skepticism toward the other megacaps, we need to turn back the clock a few years. ChatGPT launched Nov.
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30, 2022 The catalyst for this entire technology revolution was the launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT in late 2022. While we're oversimplifying a bit, in the wake of ChatGPT, Amazon, Google parent Alphabet, Meta Platforms, and Microsoft started spending tens of billions of dollars on more compute capacity and data centers, while also working on AI-infused products. At various points along the way, each faced some level of skepticism from Wall Street.
But generally speaking, their spending was considered a good and necessary thing. And, since a lot of this money was being spent on Nvidia's cutting-edge AI chips and networking gear, it was the biggest winner of them all. Apple was seen as late to the AI party.
Perhaps its invitation got lost in the mail? It did not have a cloud-computing service receiving an influx of AI-related demand (unlike Amazon, Microsoft, and Google). It also had no large language model (LLM), the underlying technology behind ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude, to speak of.
Financial markets are tracking the development closely as investors assess the likely impact.
