Apple $AAPL ( ▼ 0.25% ) is showing up as a surprise AI favorite heading into 2026, even as it continues to avoid the loud, capital-heavy AI arms race dominating Big Tech. While most megacaps are flooding the market with GPU spend and splashy model launches, Apple’s appeal right now is precisely that it is not doing that.
Winning by not playing the same game
Apple’s AI approach has been almost invisible compared with peers like Microsoft $MSFT ( ▲ 0.21% ) , Tesla $TSLA ( ▼ 1.03% ) , Palantir $PLTR ( ▼ 1.81% ) , and CrowdStrike $CRWD ( ▼ 0.06% ) . Instead of racing to build massive standalone AI platforms, Apple is positioning itself to quietly absorb the benefits of everyone else’s spending and layer them into its existing ecosystem.
With roughly 2.4 billion active iOS devices and 1.5 billion iPhones in circulation, Apple doesn’t need to win the AI infrastructure war. It just needs to apply AI features in ways that improve user experience across hardware and services, where switching costs are already high and margins are proven.
The anti-capex AI trade
Apple’s 2025 performance has looked very different from the rest of Big Tech. Gains have been driven largely by the iPhone upgrade cycle and steady services revenue, not by AI hype. That restraint has also kept spending in check, allowing Apple to continue returning massive amounts of cash to shareholders.
In its most recent quarter alone, Apple spent about $20 billion on share buybacks, more than Google $GOOGL ( ▲ 0.09% ) , Meta $META ( ▲ 1.1% ) , Microsoft $MSFT ( ▲ 0.21% ) , and Oracle $ORCL ( ▲ 0.94% ) combined over the same period. In a market increasingly skeptical of open-ended AI capex, that discipline is part of the stock’s appeal.
Optionality without the risk premium
Apple still has the option to lean harder into AI if and when it chooses. Recent internal changes suggest leadership is well aware of the need to improve execution. But by staying selective and avoiding a full-scale capex surge, Apple preserves what investors value most: consistent profits, massive free cash flow, and reliable shareholder returns.
That dynamic helps explain why Apple now trades at one of the highest forward price-to-earnings ratios among the Magnificent 7, second only to Tesla $TSLA ( ▼ 1.03% ) . For now, investors appear comfortable paying up for an AI strategy that is quiet, incremental, and deeply embedded rather than loud, expensive, and uncertain.