Apple posted record September-quarter sales and $30.7 billion in profit while spending a sliver of what its rivals pour into data centers. Memory costs are the catch.
StockPizza Desk · 2 Nov 2026 · 4 min readIn the same AI spending race, Microsoft’s operations still cover the bill with cash to spare, while Alphabet’s cash flow has turned negative.
The Claude maker’s S-1 shows revenue up fourteenfold in a year, a first operating profit and hundreds of billions in compute contracts. Growth is cooling just as those contracts start to bill.
Microsoft’s cloud business combines subscriptions and usage-based services, supported by infrastructure that requires substantial investment before it generates returns.