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Tech stocks today: Wall Street reacts to Apple CEO Tim Cook's decision to step down
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The above button links to Coinbase. Yahoo Finance is not a broker-dealer or investment adviser and does not offer securities or cryptocurrencies for sale or facilitate trading. Coinbase pays us for certain activity generated through this link. Prices displayed are informational. Apple (AAPL) stock fell less than 1% in premarket trading on Tuesday following the Tim Cook’s surprise announcement that he will be stepping down as Apple CEO in September. Cook will be replaced by senior vice president of hardware engineering, John Ternus, but will remain at the company as executive chairman. On Monday, tech stocks more broadly eked out gains amid concerns about the stability of the ceasefire in the war in Iran. The slight gains came after a resurgence in the artificial intelligence trade helped push major indexes to all-time highs last week. Marvell (MRVL) was among the few outliers as its stock jumped more than 4% after The Information reported that the company is partnering with Alphabet (GOOG, GOOGL) to develop a new tensor processing unit (TPU) and AI memory chip to take on Nvidia’s (NVDA) GPUs. Tesla (TSLA), meanwhile, will report its first quarter earnings after the bell on Wednesday. Investors are likely to focus on the company’s ongoing Robotaxi effort and its capital expenditures. Tesla’s stock fell again to start the week after it ended an eight-week losing streak last week following optimism on the AI chip front. Read more about today's market action. Apple (AAPL) on Monday announced that CEO Tim Cook will step down from the role he’s held since August 2011 on Sept. 1. During his time as CEO, Cook oversaw the launch of a variety of new products, including the Apple Watch, AirPods, and the company’s new MacBook Neo. He’s also been instrumental in increasing Apple’s Services segment revenue to more than $100 billion, the company’s second-largest business behind the iPhone. Cook leveraged his supply chain expertise to dramatically expand Apple’s business. The company’s market capitalization has grown from $350 billion to just north of $4 trillion as of the end of the trading day Monday, a staggering 1,000% increase. Yearly revenue has quadrupled from $108 billion in 2011 to $416 billion in 2025. Apple’s iPhone revenue, in particular, has skyrocketed under Cook’s leadership, from $47.1 billion to $209.6 billion this year. Read more here. Amazon said Monday it will invest another $5 billion into Anthropic — and potentially up to $20 billion — as part of a new agreement with the AI startup that will see Anthropic commit to spending at least $100 billion with AWS over the next ten years. Amazon has previously invested $8 billion in Anthropic. In a press release, the company’s said this deal, “encompasses current and future generations of Trainium (Amazon’s custom silicon) and tens of millions of Graviton cores (Amazon’s widely-adopted CPU chip) to provide superior price performance. Adding: “Anthropic will secure up to 5 gigawatts (GW) of capacity to train and power their advanced AI models, including significant Trainium3 capacity expected to come online this year. The collaboration also includes a meaningful expansion of international inference in Asia and Europe to better serve Claude’s growing international customer base.” Amazon stock was up more than 2% in extended trading on Monday after the news. The Tim Cook era at Apple is coming to a close. On Monday, the company announced that Cook would step down as CEO, effective Sept. 1. John Ternus, who currently leads the company’s hardware engineering division, will take the role. Cook, who has served as Apple CEO since 2011, will take a role as the company’s executive chairman. “It has been the greatest privilege of my life to be the CEO of Apple and to have been trusted to lead such an extraordinary company,” Cook said in a statement. “John Ternus has the mind of an engineer, the soul of an innovator, and the heart to lead with integrity and with honor.” The change comes after what Apple said in a statement was a “thoughtful, long-term succession planning process.” Apple also announced Monday that Johny Srouji was named to a new role as the company’s chief hardware officer. Srouji had lead the company’s hardware technology efforts; this role will combine Apple’s hardware efforts under one unit. Google (GOOG, GOOGL) is making a hard push to ensure its internal AI coding models can keep up with those from rival Anthropic (ANTH.PVT). According to The Information, the effort, which the publication refers to as a “strike team,” is focused on ensuring that Google’s coding models can eventually write AI software on their own. The move comes after individuals within Google’s AI teams look to catch up to Anthropic’s own AI coding capabilities. Anthropic’s Claude Code is considered among the best on the market and is a key component of the company’s success with enterprise users. But Google’s coding efforts aren’t part of a planned public release. The Information says the software would instead be trained using Google’s internal code and then deployed within the company itself, rather than offered to customers. Companies have rapidly adopted AI coding technologies to accelerate the rollout of new software and reduce costs. But that’s also led to concerns over job losses among junior developers, as well as fear among cybersecurity experts that the speed at which code is being written and released could result in more unseen bugs entering the public sphere, leading to future cyberattacks. Yahoo Finance’s Jared Blikre reports: Read more here. Yahoo Finance's Brian Sozzi reports: Read more here. Tesla (TSLA) will report first-quarter earnings after the bell on Wednesday, with Wall Street focused on the company’s slow-to-evolve robotaxi rollout and cap-ex spending, which is expected to balloon due to its AI ventures. Analysts expect Tesla to post revenue of $22.08 billion, down 9% year over year, according to Bloomberg consensus. Tesla’s adjusted EPS is expected to come in at $0.35, with adjusted EBITDA projected for $3.217 billion, down 14.4% versus Q1 last year. The key to Tesla’s growth is the rollout of its robotaxi service. Over the weekend, the company said it had expanded robotaxi service to parts of Dallas and Houston. Prior to this expansion, Tesla only offered robotaxi service in Austin and ride-hailing services in the San Francisco bay area. Read more here. Meta (META) is teaming up with CBRE to launch a multi-year program that will train US workers to become fiber technicians, as the tech giant looks for ways to fill such positions as part of its massive data center buildout. Fiber technicians install and maintain the networking tools within data centers and other high-tech facilities. The four-week program, LevelUp Fiber Technician Pathway, Meta says, will provide individuals ranging from high school graduates to mid-career professionals with the skills they need to operate in the field. “We currently operate or are building 27 data centers in the US. Since 2010, these projects have supported more than 30,000 skilled trade jobs during construction and more than 5,000 permanent operational roles like site managers and engineers,” Meta said in a statement. The data center boom has run into a shortage of skilled construction workers, with the construction industry trade group Associated Builders and Contractors estimating that 499,000 new workers will be needed in 2026 to meet demand. Yahoo Finance’s Ines Ferré reports: Read more here. Alphabet (GOOG, GOOGL) and Marvell Technology (MRVL) are reportedly in talks to jointly develop two AI chips. Marvell stock jumped more than 5% in premarket trading on Monday, while Google stock slipped 1%. The Information reported on Sunday that the two companies were looking to build a memory processing unit to work with Google's tensor processing unit (TPU) and another specifically for running artificial intelligence models. Google has been working on TPUs for more than a decade to show that the tech company, an Nvidia (NVDA) customer, can also develop its own AI chips and boost sales. According to the report, Google and Marvell intend to finalize the chip’s design by next year. Read more here. Meta (META) is planning its first round of extensive layoffs for May 20, Reuters reported Friday. A second round is expected to come later this year. According to a source familiar with the matter, the Facebook parent company intends to cut about 10% of its workforce, or about 8,000 employees. A second round of job cuts is slated for the end of the year, though the details about the extent and timing of those layoffs aren’t finalized, Reuters reported. The expected layoffs come as Meta and other tech companies look to artificial intelligence for productivity gains (though it’s possible some are using AI as a cover story to thin their ranks). According to the Federal Reserve’s latest report on economic conditions, AI has “not yet significantly impacted” staffing levels overall. But “some noted that AI-driven productivity improvements had enabled many firms to delay or reduce hiring,” the so-called Beige Book said. So far in 2026, 73,212 tech employees have been laid off, according to Layoffs.fyi. Notable layoff examples came from Block (XYZ), Snap (SNAP), and Atlassian (TEAM) — all three of which cited AI efficiency as reasons for the cuts. On Friday, Figma (FIG) stock fell as much as 6.8% after Anthropic unveiled Claude Design, a new product powered by its Opus 4.7 model that lets users “collaborate with Claude to create polished visual work like designs, prototypes, slides, one-pagers, and more.” Figma, which went public last year in one of the year’s biggest IPOs, said in its S-1 filing that, “Figma is where teams come together to turn ideas into the world’s best digital products and experiences.” In other words, Figma is a collaborative design tool, which is what Anthropic just announced. Since the company went public last summer, Figma stock has dropped more than 80% from its post-IPO high. Earlier this week, Anthropic’s chief product officer, Mike Krieger, stepped down from Figma’s board. Krieger previously co-founded Instagram and the AI news app Artifact, which Yahoo acquired in 2024. The AI race is moving quickly. And as quickly as companies develop new models, raise new funding, and make new hires, so too does the tech industry’s view of the field's key players shift. So, after weeks as the industry’s darling, Anthropic has seen this past week defined by its perceived shortcomings. On Thursday, Anthropic released its latest model, Claude Opus 4.7. Notably, this is not its most advanced model — that is Mythos Preview, which it has released to a select number of partners as part of Project Glasswing. The challenge, however, is that users have noticed. Tae Kim, author of the newsletter Key Context and a recent book on Nvidia, compiled a series of complaints from notable commentators on X, highlighting a variety of perceived deficiencies in Opus 4.7. Gergely Orosz, who writes the Pragmatic Engineer newsletter, also called Opus 4.7 “surprisingly combative.” Orosz has also been among those in the tech space, noting that Claude has notably struggled to keep up with tasks in recent weeks. Anthropic’s compute disadvantage — that is, the amount of raw computing power available to the company — relative to OpenAI has become a major point of discussion as adoption of Claude, specifically Claude Code, has ramped in recent weeks. This also comes as the company’s rollout of Mythos Preview continues to confound some commentators, with a description of its capabilities — but a less transparent view of its benchmarks — making the cybersecurity vulnerabilities reportedly surfaced by Mythos feel like a blend of PR spin and a true AGI moment. As my colleagues point out in the blog below, chip stocks have helped drive a powerful rally in tech stocks in recent weeks. But there’s one stock in particular that’s worth paying attention to: Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). Shares of AMD might be down slightly on Friday, but they’re sitting at all-time highs after gaining 30% year to date, outpacing competitor Nvidia (NVDA). Wall Street analysts see the company as a primary beneficiary of the boom in agentic artificial intelligence this year. As agentic AI increases the need for central processing units (CPUs), it has driven demand for the chips AMD designs far beyond expectations. And on Thursday, AMD’s chip producer, Taiwan Semiconductor (TSM), sent another bullish signal on demand. "AI-related demand continued to be extremely robust," Taiwan Semiconductor CEO C.C. Wei told analysts on a conference call. "The shift from generative AI and the query mode to agentic AI and ... the action mode is leading to another step up in the amount of tokens being consumed. This is driving the need for more and more computation, which supports the robust demand for leading-edge silicon." AMD’s margins are expected to rise as the company shifts toward data center and server chips, which command higher value. “Our Strong Buy opinion reflects AMD's positioning to close the competitive gap with NVIDIA through MI450x launch and rack-scale solutions,” CFRA analyst Angelo Zino wrote in a note earlier this week. “We believe the 6 GW Meta deal improves visibility/reduces tail risk (a big concern in this market for the AI trade), adds conviction to AMD’s shift into large scale solutions, and supports share gain.” Yahoo Finance's Jared Blikre reports: Read more here. Anthropic on Thursday announced its latest AI model, Claude Opus 4.7, is now generally available. “Opus 4.7 is a notable improvement on Opus 4.6 in advanced software engineering, with particular gains on the most difficult tasks,” the company said in its release. “Users report being able to hand off their hardest coding work—the kind that previously needed close supervision—to Opus 4.7 with confidence. Opus 4.7 handles complex, long-running tasks with rigor and consistency, pays precise attention to instructions, and devises ways to verify its own outputs before reporting back.” The catch, however, is that this is not Anthropic’s most advanced model. That title is held by its Mythos model, which the company announced last week would be available for a limited preview among a select number of partners given the safety concerns around that model’s capabilities. Last week, Anthropic announced “Project Glasswing,” which will bring together companies to test Mythos Preview, which Anthropic said it found decades-old cybersecurity vulnerabilities in on its own, among other capabilities. “We stated [last week] we would keep Claude Mythos Preview’s release limited and test new cyber safeguards on less capable models first,” Anthropic said Thursday. “Opus 4.7 is the first such model: its cyber capabilities are not as advanced as those of Mythos Preview (indeed, during its training we experimented with efforts to differentially reduce these capabilities). We are releasing Opus 4.7 with safeguards that automatically detect and block requests that indicate prohibited or high-risk cybersecurity uses. What we learn from the real-world deployment of these safeguards will help us work toward our eventual goal of a broad release of Mythos-class models.” Tesla (TSLA) stock slipped in early trade but is poised to finish the week higher and snap a current eight-week losing streak. News on the chipmaking front may be boosting the stock. Tesla stock jumped 7.6% on Wednesday before dipping on Thursday. Though the news flow was light on the Tesla front, some traders and analysts attributed the move to CEO Elon Musk’s claim early Wednesday that Tesla was “taping out,” or had completed the final stage of the chip design process for its upcoming AI5 chip, destined for future EVs, massive training clusters, and Optimus robots. “I believe 80% of the [Wednesday’s stock] move is related to Elon’s nocturnal post on X announcing the tape out for Hardware 5 is complete,” Deepwater Asset Management’s Gene Munster said on Wednesday. “That’s an important update given in the world where cars are computers on wheels, a 5x improvement in chip performance helps unlock FSD and Robotaxi.” Read more here. Yahoo Finance's Brian Sozzi reports: Read more here. Vertical Aerospace (EVTL) stock jumped on Thursday after the company revealed a new milestone for its Valo air taxi. The company said it became only the second company globally to complete a “two-way piloted transition” flight in its eVTOL (electric vertical take off and landing) aircraft, and the first to do so under civil aviation Design Organization Approval regulatory oversight. Vertical said the two-way piloted transition means the Valo aircraft transitioned from “vertical take-off to wingborne cruise and back to vertical landing — all in one continuous flight.” In other words, its movable propellers move from helicopter to flight mode and back again while in flight. Read more from Vertical’s news release here. Yahoo’s Francisco Velasquez reports.
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