Apple Posts Record Quarter as Rivals Pour Billions Into AI

Apple just announced its biggest quarter ever for the September period. Revenue grew 12% year over year to $114.5 billion. Profit came in at $30.7 billion. The company posted its best iPhone sales for a September quarter, up 17% year over year to $57.6 billion. And it did this without even releasing a new budget iPhone this year. Meanwhile, the four biggest U.S. tech companies — Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta — are pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into their AI infrastructure, including data centers and chips for training and running AI models.

Apple is barely a player in the AI infrastructure arms race. Yet it keeps posting record iPhone sales. That tells me something: pouring huge sums of money into AI infrastructure does not automatically produce a product people want to buy. A big compute bill does not earn you points on its own. You win only if you actually build something useful.