Between July and September, Amazon spent roughly $77 billion on data centres, servers and chips.
Contrast that to Apple, who have spent just $9 billion in the past 12 months…
Same AI boom, yet opposite bets.
The four big cloud companies (Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet and Meta) are on course to spend around $725 billion on CAPEX this year.
Yet in the same period, Apple cut its own spending by 29%…
Because of this, plenty of analysts say Apple is losing the AI race.
Which might be the case… but if so… Apple is losing on purpose.
The cloud giants are betting that AI lives in their data centres. So that every question you ask ChatGPT or Claude makes a round trip to a server farm, and they collect rent on each trip.
Apple is betting that more of that thinking happens on the phone in your pocket. Apple Intelligence was built to run on the device first and only send harder requests to Apple’s own servers.
And when Apple needed a smarter Siri… they simply licensed Google’s Gemini model, at a reported cost of around $1 billion a year.
So Apple has quietly bet against Amazon and the rest of the group.
If AI moves onto the device, Apple already owns the distribution with more than 2.5 billion active devices…
And theorectically, each device is a small AI computer that the customer paid for (plus pays the maintenance cost for things like charging)
Whereas the cloud companies are footing the bill for their own buildout and maintenance
Now the weak spot is the iPhone itself.
In fiscal 2015, Apple sold 231 million iPhones, up 37% thanks to the iPhone 6.
In 2025, research firm IDC estimates Apple shipped about 248 million… so a decade of work for roughly 7% more phones.
Apple revenue kept growing anyway… because it charged more for each phone and sold services like the App Store and iCloud on top, which brought in $31.6 billion last quarter alone.
But services is a toll road built on the iPhone. It earns more only when more traffic arrives.
That’s why local AI matters so much to Apple… because it gives people a reason to replace a phone that still works fine.
If that happens, Apple wins twice. It sells the new phones, and it never had to pay for the $725 billion buildout.
If AI stays in the cloud and people hold on to their phones for longer, Apple is left selling roughly the same number of phones it sold in 2015, with nothing new to make people upgrade.
That makes Apple the closest thing in big tech to a hedge against the AI buildout… and one of the more interesting storylines of the next couple of years.
Oliver