Amazon's Q2 blowout put AWS at the apex of the compute chokepoint and dragged the power-and-cooling suppliers up with it, while memory took a breather after Thursday's blast-off.

Amazon led the vertical at +15.3% to $271.58 after a Q2 report (out Thursday after the close) that reset expectations for the demand apex of the compute chokepoint. Revenue hit $200.6 billion, up 20% and above the $196.5 billion consensus; operating income rose 43% to $27.5 billion; and — the number that moved the tape — AWS grew 36.7% to $42.2 billion, its fifth straight quarter of acceleration, with a backlog near $500 billion and triple-digit growth. Management flagged that Amazon's in-house AI and silicon businesses (Trainium/Inferentia) now each run above a $25 billion annualized rate, with adoption from Anthropic and OpenAI. AWS capacity is the buildout every supplier below it prices on; a reaccelerating hyperscaler is the cleanest possible demand signal for the whole stack.

The laggard was the memory chokepoint, and it was a breather rather than a break. Micron fell −5.9% to $823.03, giving back part of Thursday's double-digit surge (it had closed Thursday at $874.66 on Microsoft's demand-first capex guide), and SK hynix eased −8.8% in its latest Seoul session. The structural picture is unchanged: DRAM remains in shortage, with long-term contract pricing running from the low-teens to the mid-$20s per gigabyte and Deutsche Bank modeling roughly a 10% 2026 supply shortfall. Friday was profit-taking into scarcity, not a crack in the HBM-and-DRAM bottleneck that hands makers pricing power.

The power-and-cooling chokepoint did the heavy lifting on its own earnings. Eaton rose +7.3% to $415.20, having grown its electrical order book 42% organically on the data-center buildout, and Vertiv jumped +6.2% to $241.57 after posting Q2 revenue up 24%, EPS up more than 50%, and free cash flow up 234%, while raising full-year adjusted-EPS guidance to $6.65–$6.75; nVent tracked them at +6.2%. Optics and interconnect stayed firm (Applied Optoelectronics +4.7%, Arista +5.5%, Amkor +3.3%, Marvell +2.3%), the other mega-cap buyers rose (Alphabet +6.7%, Meta +3.3%, Microsoft +3.0%), and semicap was mixed (Applied Materials +1.2%, but Camtek −3.5% and CoreWeave −2.9%).

The calendar now tests whether the demand read holds down the stack. AMD reports August 4; SoftBank on August 7; Applied Materials' fiscal Q3 and Coherent on August 13; Lumentum August 18; Marvell August 20; Fabrinet August 24; and NVIDIA on August 26, with Broadcom on September 3. Hot Chips runs August 23–25. Further out, Ecolab's ~$4.75 billion CoolIT acquisition is expected to close in Q3, and the OpenAI and Anthropic listing windows — the private demand that now anchors AWS's backlog — sit in the back half of the year.