Meta – up by $148 billion, Apple – down by $70 billion. Is that the AI wake-up call the iPhone 16 needs?

Fortuna’s wheel spins and spins, and now’s the time for Meta to rise in stock market value, while Apple – which once again topped Fortune’s Most Admired Company list – is losing.

Meta and Amazon added a combined $280 billion in stock market value late on Thursday after they reported quarterly results that impressed investors, while Apple’s value shrank by $70 billion (via Reuters).

Meta achieved some serious surge – over 14% to a record high of $451, thus boosting Facebook’s parent company’s market capitalization by $148 billion to $1.16 trillion.

Then, there’s Apple. While Cupertino’s giant quarterly results exceeded analysts’ expectations, its China sales were not good enough, missed estimates and its stock dipped 3.3%. “Apple faces tough competition in China, which has worried Wall Street in recent months”, the report has it.

Also, Reuters notes that investor optimism about generative AI drove rallies in the U.S. stock market’s most valuable companies last year, with many hitting all-time highs in recent sessions.

For example, in January Microsoft topped Apple as the world’s most valuable company, with investors viewing Apple as lagging in the AI race between Wall Street’s tech heavyweights.
Apple CEO Tim Cook assured investors that they’re working on something: “We’ve got some things that we’re incredibly excited about that we’ll be talking about later this year”. This, however, can’t change the fact that Apple is simply late to the AI party and such a miss can have very real consequences.

More than 10 analysts that Reuters consulted with agreed that Microsoft’s lead over Apple in stock market value will probably grow over the next five years thanks to its early advantage in AI.

“For Apple to be able to accelerate growth, we would need either a material contribution from new products like the Vision Pro or a generative AI driven cycle to come through the iPhone 16,” D.A. Davidson analyst Gil Luria said following its results.

Meta, for example, is already at the next AI level: Zuck’s company plans to deploy into its data centers a new version of a custom AI-centric chip in 2024. As reported by Reuters, the chip will be a second generation of an in-house silicon line that will help Meta to reduce its dependence on the Nvidia chips.