The Capex Number Nobody Can Call a Peak Anymore
Premarket briefing, Friday July 31, 2026, 8:30 AM ET.
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Situational Awareness
📈 Futures green, led by tech. Dow +0.5%, S&P 500 +0.3%, Nasdaq-100 +1%. Thursday’s rebound is extending rather than fading, with $AMZN holding its overnight gain.
💰 The four hyperscalers now guide to $720-745B of combined 2026 capex. That is the number that ends the “AI capex has peaked” argument that drove the month-long semis drawdown. Semis were the worst 1-month cohort we track (-17.8%) going into this week.
🛢️ Oil majors printed windfalls. $XOM and $CVX both reported Q2 gains on elevated crude from the US-Iran energy shock. Energy is the strongest 1-month cohort on our board (+11.0%), and it has been leading quietly while everyone watched semis.
🇰🇷 South Korea committed $880B over ten years to semiconductors and AI infrastructure, with Samsung and SK Hynix together putting up $518B toward new fabs. $SKHY is +6.2% premarket on roughly 2x relative volume, one of the few names moving on real volume.
🏛️ Tomorrow is the White House AI pre-release review deadline (Aug 1). 1,134 employees across the frontier labs signed a letter on 7/28 asking Washington for tooling to pace development. A policy overhang worth tracking, not yet a tradeable event.
Bellwether Watch:
🟢 $AMZN, HOLDING and now confirmed. +10.5% premarket, holding the full overnight move rather than giving it back. AWS +36.7% accelerating for a fifth straight quarter, capex to ~$220B, $496B backlog. The operating-line strength is real; the EPS line still carries a $53.4B non-operating Anthropic mark and TTM free cash flow is negative at -$7.6B.
🔴 $AAPL, CRACKING further. -7.6% premarket, extending below Thursday’s after-hours drop. Beat both lines, then guided down on supply constraints. The market is weighting the guide, and it is weighting it harder this morning than it did last night.
Top Calls
$REPL +132% · regulatory · High, FDA advisory committee voted 10-3 that RP1’s efficacy data is clinically meaningful, overruling its own staff reviewers. Class 1 action date Aug 2.
$AXTI +37% · STRONG⭐⭐ (87) · High, datacenter optical connectivity inflection, record indium phosphide quarter. The only name today that cleared the volume gate.
$COHU +22% · vol-gated · Medium, semi test utilization hit 80%, management’s stated trigger for renewed customer capex.
$NWL +18% · vol-gated · Medium, EPS surprise +112% against a consensus that expected a 21% YoY decline.
$MPWR +11% · vol-gated · Medium, EPS +10.7%, revenue +8.6% surprise.
$AMZN +10.5% · vol-gated · Medium-High, see Bellwether Watch.
NVT * * + 8.8ETN +8.2% · vol-gated · Medium, the datacenter power complex printing together.
Six of seven fresh prints returned SKIP on the volume gate. That is a measurement artifact of scoring before the 9:30 open, not a verdict: premarket relative volume cannot reach a full-session threshold. Treat them as provisional until re-scored after the open. $AXTI is the exception and cleared it outright.
The Setups
$REPL, +132%, the day’s cleanest catalyst. - FDA advisory committee voted 10-3 that the IGNYTE efficacy data is evaluable and clinically meaningful, directly contradicting FDA staff scientists who had argued the single-arm design couldn’t establish contribution to benefit. - 33.6% objective response rate in anti-PD-1-refractory advanced melanoma, a population with high unmet need. - Third attempt. The BLA was rejected in July 2025 and again in April 2026. Class 1 action date is Aug 2. - Premarket move is on 17.7x relative volume, by far the heaviest on the board.
$AXTI, +37%, the only clean EP score today. - EP-γ 87, STRONG⭐⭐, on rVol 2.96. Cleared the volume gate that stopped every other name. - Record quarterly indium phosphide revenue, the substrate under the lasers in high-speed optical transceivers. This is a component-level read on optics demand, not general semis drift. - EPS surprise +164%, revenue surprise +40%. - Second day of the move: +27% Thursday, +24% after hours, +37% now. Short float was 17.6% going in.
$COHU, +22% - Semiconductor test utilization rose to 80%, which management names as the level where customers resume capital spending. - HPC pipeline $850M, plus a $26M single-customer order booked in early July. - The caution: revenue surprise was only +3.3% against an EPS surprise of +86%. The beat is cost and mix, not demand.
$NVT +8.8% and ETN + 8.2 − **NVT: revenue surprise +12.0%, EPS +15.9%. The cleaner of the two prints. - $ETN is the $163B bellwether here. Last quarter it reported datacenter orders up 240% and electrical backlog up 48%, and put total datacenter backlog at 228 GW. - Two names in the same niche beating on the same morning is a cohort signal, not two coincidences.
$NWL, +18% - EPS surprise +112% against a consensus looking for a 21% YoY decline. A low bar cleared by a wide margin. - Not an AI name and not in any leadership cohort. Included because the surprise magnitude is genuine.
The Down Prints (context, not setups)
Neither is a call. This framework screens gap-ups with catalysts, so a down move has no setup in it, and nothing here is a short idea.
$RBLX, -19.5%. Q2 revenue $1.46B (+36%) and bookings +8%, but DAU came in at 123M against 128.7M expected, and Q3 bookings guidance of $1.58-1.65B implies a 14-18% YoY decline, roughly 9% under consensus. Cause is a deliberate discovery-algorithm change favoring long-term retention over immediate monetization, which crushed under-13 spending. Self-inflicted and strategic, which is a different risk than demand loss.
$AAPL, -7.6%. See Bellwether Watch.
Yesterday’s Calls, One Day On
$AXTI +37% premarket, from +24% after hours. Followed through hard.
$COHU +22%, from +18% after hours. Followed through.
$AMZN +10.5%, from +9.5% after hours. Held the move overnight and added to it.
$AAPL -7.6%, from -6% after hours. Extended lower.
$COIN flagged as a negative call at -6.5% after hours on a revenue and EBITDA miss.
Four of five moved further in the direction called. The one genuinely useful lesson: $AXTI was vol-gated to SKIP last night on after-hours volume and scores STRONG⭐⭐ this morning on the same underlying print. The gate was measuring the session, not the setup.
Bottom line: $REPL is the highest-conviction catalyst on the board, an FDA panel overruling its own staff reviewers two days before the action date. $AXTI is the cleanest scored setup and the only name that cleared the volume gate.
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Not financial advice. For informational purposes only. Do your own research.