They are seen as the big laggard in tech’s fastest-growing field — and it is doing them no harm at all. Quite the opposite:
Apple’s market capitalisation climbed above $5 trillion on Tuesday for the first time in the company’s history. The stock gained as much as 1.3 per cent during the session, pushing the group past a threshold only one other company has ever reached: AI chip designer Nvidia. By the close, Apple had given back part of those gains, trading around 0.4 per cent higher and just below the $5 trillion mark.
The milestone comes a day after another reversal: on Monday, Apple overtook Nvidia to become the world’s most valuable listed company — for the first time since May of last year.
Diverging trajectories
The two stocks have moved in markedly different directions this year. Apple is up roughly a quarter since the start of the year. Nvidia, by contrast, has lost significant ground since its peak in May and — against the backdrop of a broader sell-off across the semiconductor sector — is now up only about seven per cent for the year.
Behind the shift is a rotation within the tech segment: investors are pulling capital out of AI and chip stocks and moving into more defensive positions. In that movement, Apple is serving as a relatively safe haven inside the technology sector.
Sitting out the capex race
The reason lies precisely in the thing most often held against Apple in recent years. Since ChatGPT launched in late 2022, the major cloud providers — Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Meta — have been locked in a spending race on AI infrastructure. Apple has essentially stayed out of it, committing no comparable billions to data centres and accelerators.
How heavily that difference now weighs became clear in the reaction to the latest quarterly figures from Google parent Alphabet: the company said it would raise capital spending to as much as $205 billion this year, while reporting negative free cash flow of $5.9 billion. Markets took fright — the capital intensity of the AI build-out is increasingly being read as a risk rather than purely as a growth promise.
Apple’s balance sheet is largely free of that burden. The company still makes its money from hardware and services rather than from operating large-scale model infrastructure — and therefore carries none of the corresponding depreciation charges or cash outflows.
Siri reboot softens the laggard image
At the same time, Apple is beginning to shed its reputation as an AI laggard. The revamped version of its Siri voice assistant has drawn broadly positive feedback in early testing, with a full rollout expected later this year. That tempers the picture of a company that slept through the technology wave — without Apple having to enter the infrastructure race to do so.
Whether the valuation holds should become clearer within days: Apple reports its latest quarterly results this week, alongside other Big Tech groups.
Aus Datenschutz-Gründen ist dieser Inhalt ausgeblendet. Die Einbettung von externen Inhalten kann in den Datenschutz-Einstellungen aktiviert werden:
