Apple reports fiscal Q2 2026 after the close on April 30, with consensus around $109.7B in revenue, $1.95 EPS, and roughly $30B in Services revenue. Amazon also reports today. Together they close out a Big Tech earnings week dominated by AI capital spending; tonight's prints will determine whether the week ends with the hyperscaler-capex narrative reinforced or undercut.
Two questions matter most. For Apple, whether Services growth holds in the high single digits with a 70%+ gross margin will indicate how much of the company's AI strategy is showing up in monetization rather than press releases — Apple is the only Big Tech name without a 2026 capex story, and investors want to see it converting on-device intelligence into Services revenue instead. For Amazon, the question is AWS's growth rate against Microsoft's 40% Azure print and Alphabet's accelerating Google Cloud, plus whether AWS continues to lead on AI inference workloads despite hosting OpenAI through Bedrock.
There is also a narrative subplot at Apple: this is one of Tim Cook's last quarterly calls before John Ternus takes over as CEO on September 1. Whatever Cook says about the AI roadmap on tonight's call will shape expectations for Ternus's first year — and whether Apple keeps a bring-your-own-model partnership posture (Gemini, ChatGPT) or starts to lean harder on its own foundation models.
Takeaway for learners: an earnings call is one of the most efficient ways to learn how a company actually thinks about AI, because executives have to answer specific questions from analysts under SEC liability. If you want a clearer mental model of where the AI industry is heading, listen to a few of these calls live or read the transcripts the next morning — you will learn more than from a quarter's worth of product-launch posts.