Fortune 500

Amazon’s stock price jumped more than 9% in after-hours trading on Thursday after the retail-and-AI giant reported second-quarter results buoyed by its Amazon Web Services cloud business, which is racing faster ahead than it has in more than four years. AWS added more than $4.6 billion in revenue quarter over quarter, and AWS operating income hit $16.6 billion, up 64% from $10.2 billion a year ago, on a 39.4% margin, up from 32.9% in the same period a year ago. AWS backlog—customer agreements representing future revenue—grew to $496 billion. During Thursday’s earnings call, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told investors that Amazon now expects to devote $220 billion to capital expenditures in 2026, up from its prior estimate of $200 billion, owing to higher memory costs. Even at the elevated level, however, Jassy said Amazon still won’t “have enough capacity to meet all the demand we have in 2026. Read more: https://lnkd.in/e7ynb3yU

Amazon is now the world’s biggest company, but its founder once doubted the business would survive. “Amazon is not too big to fail,” then-CEO Jeff Bezos reportedly told employees in a 2018 all-hands meeting. “In fact, I predict one day Amazon will fail. Amazon will go bankrupt. If you look at large companies, their life spans tend to be 30-plus years, not a 100-plus years.” Eight years later, Amazon sits atop the Fortune #Global500 for the first time, overtaking Walmart to become the world’s largest company by revenue. Read more: https://lnkd.in/ez6tF5NN

Apple said it is facing severe supply constraints that will affect sales of iPhones and Macs in the months ahead, underscoring the challenges looming over the company as Tim Cook prepares to hand over the CEO reins. In his final earnings call as CEO, Cook said he has never been more optimistic about the opportunities ahead for Apple. “I am beyond excited,” said Cook, who has led the company for 15 years and will pass the CEO baton to John Ternus in September. But Cook’s confidence in the future stood in contrast to the picture that he and other executives painted of the current business conditions. Read more: https://lnkd.in/edwRhDQT

Microsoft said its Azure cloud business surpassed $100 billion in annual revenue in its recently ended fiscal year, cheering investors in the company even as the broader market plunged on worries over AI spending and U.S. inflation. Cloud growth in Microsoft’s fiscal fourth quarter increased 43% percent year over year, providing a boost to overall quarterly revenue of $90 billion, above analyst estimates of $87.7 billion. Azure, the core of Microsoft’s cloud business, surpassed $100 billion in annual revenue for the first time ever this fiscal year, rising 41% over last year’s $75 billion, CEO Satya Nadella said. The gain helps cement Microsoft’s Azure as a leading cloud giant behind Amazon Web Services, and as one of the most prominent providers of the infrastructure undergirding the AI era. Read more: https://lnkd.in/g_Jz5z4n

More than 30 years after joining Dow as an intern, Karen S. Carter became the CEO this year, taking the helm of a company. Carter is the first woman and the first Black CEO for the nearly 130-year-old manufacturer, which is the largest chemicals company in the Americas. Last week, as Carter presided over her first earnings report as CEO, Dow posted its most profitable quarter in four years, reporting net income of $802 million and a 20% jump in net sales. Read more: https://lnkd.in/ee4647CY

Around mid-day on July 28, Apple stock jumped around 3% to achieve, for the first time, a market cap of $5 trillion, hitting a number that only one enterprise, Nvidia, had ever reached. A few days before, in fact, Apple had surged past the GPU giant to regain its mantle as the world’s most valuable company. Still, the recent moonshot in Apple’s stock poses a tough choice for folks and funds mulling a purchase right now, or tempted to sell and profit from the recent windfall on fears it will fade: Apple’s just become something it seldom was before, extremely, even scarily, expensive. Read more: https://lnkd.in/es364Ac3

Jensen Huang says AI is going to kill tasks, not jobs—a distinction that could define whether the future of work brings mass unemployment or a new wave of growth and opportunity. Speaking at Y Combinator’s Startup School in San Francisco over the weekend, Huang didn’t mince words about the effect AI will have on the labor market. “Many tasks will be automated away,” he said in a video published Monday by the famed Silicon Valley startup accelerator. “Every single job will change, and there’ll be a whole bunch of new jobs.” And yet the Nvidia CEO made clear that tasks are not the same thing as jobs. As such, he pushed back on the narrative of a white-collar bloodbath that some high-profile AI leaders have predicted. Instead, Huang argues, AI will bring more jobs, not fewer. Read more: https://lnkd.in/g5qEgBeg

For Wistron chair Simon Lin, overseeing one of the biggest growth stories in global tech is all about being in the right place at the right time—and making the right bet. Eight years ago, the Taipei-based electronics manufacturer hitched its star to Nvidia. As the chipmaker’s fortunes have soared in the AI age, so too have those of the far lesser-known company that got its start as a spinoff of laptop maker Acer and now builds the servers that hold Nvidia’s chips. Wistron’s fate illustrates how the AI wave is reaching beyond trillion-dollar chipmakers and LLM developers to lift the firms manufacturing the hardware behind the revolution. Read more: https://lnkd.in/eUamNhN7

🗺️ The Fortune Global 500 list went live yesterday, and I got the chance to peer behind the curtains and analyze how Asia’s firms fared in the rankings. 💻 For the first time, Tencent and TSMC have broken into the top 100, underscoring how surging demand for advanced chips and digital platforms is reshuffling corporate size and power across Asia and the wider world. Other Asian hardware firms also made huge leaps on the Global 500 list. Wistron, a Taiwan-based electronics manufacturer, rose 298 spots to No. 198, the largest jump by any company on this year’s list. South Korean semiconductor firm SK hynix rose 101 spots to No. 210, with revenue of $68.3 billion. 👉🏻 Read more: https://lnkd.in/gS2iXBrG As always, thank you to Nicholas Gordon for the edits!

$43,100,000,000,000. 💰 The Fortune #Global500 has a new winner: Amazon, ending Walmart’s 12-year run. The world’s biggest companies are bigger than ever, too. The corporations on our annual list of the world's 500 largest companies combined to generate $43.1 trillion in revenue in 2025, up 3.2% from the previous year. Top companies on our list include: ➡️ Amazon ➡️ Walmart ➡️ State Grid ➡️ UnitedHealth Group ➡️ aramco ➡️ Apple ➡️ McKesson ➡️ Alphabet (Google) ➡️ CVS Health ➡️ China National Petroleum 🔗 See who made our full list: https://lnkd.in/eCkNcgTS