Big Tech spent $600 billion on AI. Apple spent $9 billion and still grew 12%.

While the rest of Big Tech is spending record sums on AI data centers, Apple keeps growing without them. The iPhone maker reported revenue of $114.5 billion for its fiscal fourth quarter on Monday, up 12% from a year earlier and a record for a September quarter. Profit rose to $30.7 billion, and earnings per share climbed 14% to $2.10, ahead of the $1.99 analysts expected.

It was the first quarterly report under chief executive John Ternus, who took over from Tim Cook on September 1. For the full fiscal year, Apple’s revenue reached a record $478.8 billion, up 15%, and earnings per share rose 20%.

A very different spending bill

The contrast with its peers is stark. Over the past four quarters Apple spent about $9 billion on capital expenditure, roughly 1.8% of its sales, according to an analysis by Opening Bell Daily, and its spending in the September quarter fell more than 30% from a year earlier. Over the same period Amazon spent more than $215 billion, Alphabet more than $159 billion, Microsoft more than $135 billion and Meta more than $104 billion.

Capital expenditure over the last four reported quarters, billions of dollars (at least)

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	Capex, last four quarters
Apple	$9bn
Meta	$104bn
Microsoft	$135bn
Alphabet	$159bn
Amazon	$215bn

Source: Opening Bell Daily, company filings

That gap shows up in cash. Last week Amazon reported that its free cash flow over 12 months had turned to an outflow of $42.4 billion, and Alphabet and Meta both reported negative free cash flow for the quarter. Apple, by contrast, generated $28.1 billion of operating cash in the quarter and handed $28 billion back to shareholders, including $24 billion of share buybacks.

Investors have noticed. Through Monday’s close Apple stock was up about 24% in 2026, more than double the S&P 500’s gain and the only one of the so-called Magnificent Seven beating the market this year, according to Opening Bell Daily.

Where the growth came from

Apple’s growth came from selling devices and services to a customer base of more than 2.5 billion active devices, not from renting out computing power.

Revenue growth by segment, September quarter 2026 vs. a year earlier

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	Year-over-year change
Mac	24%
iPhone	17%
Services	10%
Wearables	−8%
iPad	−10%

Source: Apple, via MacRumors

• iPhone: $57.6 billion, up 17%, a September-quarter record, even though the new iPhone 18 Pro models were on sale for only the last week or so of the quarter.
• Services: $31.6 billion, up 10%, an all-time high. The App Store, iCloud, Apple Music and AppleCare carry a gross margin of about 76%.
• Mac: $10.8 billion, up 24%. Apple said it has never sold more Macs in a fiscal year.
• Greater China: revenue up 21%, a quarterly record, driven by iPhone and Mac.

Apple’s approach to AI explains much of the difference. It runs many features on the chips inside its own devices and handles heavier requests on its own Private Cloud Compute servers, rather than building giant clusters to train frontier models and sell cloud capacity. The money is made when customers buy a new iPhone or Mac, not years later when a data center pays off.

The catch: memory

Not spending on data centers does not shield Apple from the AI boom. The rush to build AI servers has driven up the price of memory chips, which Apple needs for every iPhone, iPad and Mac. Ternus called the memory situation “unprecedented” and said Apple expects costs to keep rising beyond the December quarter.

That is why the outlook disappointed. Apple expects revenue to grow 7% to 10% in the holiday quarter, which would be its best quarter ever, but guided its gross margin to 45% to 46%, down from 47.9% in the September quarter. That 47.9% included about one point from tariff refunds. Apple also forecast Services growth of 8% to 9%, below the roughly 10.7% analysts had expected, and said Mac and iPad supply will stay tight.

Apple is also being careful with its own AI costs. It plans usage limits on server-based features such as the new Siri, with an option to pay for more. Finance chief Kevan Parekh said the cost of running those features is still being assessed.

The shares fell as much as 4% during the earnings call and were down about 3% in after-hours trading.

What it means

Apple’s results show that there is more than one way to profit from AI. Its rivals are betting that hundreds of billions spent on infrastructure today will pay off later. Apple is betting that AI makes people buy new devices, and it collects the cash as they do. The risk for Apple is that the AI spending boom it is avoiding still reaches it through component prices.