The Talk Show: Live From WWDC
7:00pm Tuesday  •  California Theatre
Tickets Available  •  Fun Will Be Had
Alberto Romero on Apple’s AI Spending

Alberto Romero:

AI is like religion. Either you believe it changes everything, or you don’t believe at all. There is no moderate position; nobody believes in AGI “more or less,” just like nobody is “casually religious.” If God exists, the only coherent response is to reorganize your entire life around that fact, as priests do. If you pray sometimes, then you are just an atheist who’s also fearful. When tech companies spend hundreds of billions on capital expenditures to add sparkly AI features to Office, Gmail, and Instagram, I only see fearful atheists — guys who don’t believe in AI but pretend just in case.

In 2026, the four largest cloud and AI infrastructure providers — Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft — committed to spending $670 billion on CapEx. Apple, in contrast, spent $12.7 billion on capex last fiscal year and projects $14 billion for 2026, 2% of what its peers are spending. The conventional reading in Silicon Valley is, naturally, that Apple is losing. Siri has been a punchline for years — an internal executive called the delays ugly and embarrassing — and critics say that Apple has not been the same without Steve Jobs. It is falling behind, they say, and moving way too slowly for AI.

I disagree with this portrayal: Apple is the most powerful tech company in the world right now because it’s acting according to what it believes.

Some of you, I bet, will object to Romero’s notion that no one is “casually religious”. Almost everyone I know is casually religious, you might be thinking. But read the whole piece. What he’s saying is that if you’re “casually religious” those are just words. You’re not living your life according to your professed beliefs (casual or not). And that’s how most of Apple’s peer companies seem to be approaching AI.

I’m not sure he’s right, but he might be, and I think his take is at least closer to right than wrong. Apple is making an enormous bet on AI — but their bet is that they don’t need to spend hundreds of billions per year on AI infrastructure (most of it fattening Nvidia’s bottom line) to reap the benefits. If Apple’s right we should start seeing it come together tomorrow.

(Arguably we’ve already seen it coming together — demand for Apple’s products and services has gone up, not down, so far in the AI era. Entrenched leaders often grow during the initial stages of extinctive disruptions — BlackBerry’s biggest year for sales (revenue) and investor confidence (market cap) was 2011, four years after the iPhone debuted — but the disruptors are there. There’s not yet a single threat on the market to the iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, or AirPods — nor to Apple’s services revenue.)

★ Sunday, 7 June 2026