Apple's AI Strategy: Is Tim Cook Playing "3D Chess"?
Companies like Google, Meta, or Microsoft are investing billions in hyperscalers, while Apple is extremely stingy. Is Tim Cook's restraint wise?
Apple CEO Tim Cook: AI is not really his thing.
(Image: Ringo Chiu / Shutterstock)
The latest financial reports from Microsoft, Meta, or Amazon show how massively these IT giants are pouring money into AI: capital expenditures (CapEx) for chips, storage, data centers, and other necessities for running chatbots, coding tools, or agents continue to skyrocket. A major exception is Apple. While they are also building data centers and purchasing AI services, for instance, from Google, the sums involved are significantly lower than those of their competitors.
Apple has neither its chatbot nor an improved AI assistant (Siri) to show for it. The central question here is: Is Apple making a big mistake by not participating? According to an analysis by the business news agency Bloomberg, surprisingly not: Gautam Mukunda, himself a lecturer at the Yale School of Management, even claims that Apple CEO Tim Cook is playing “3D chess with AI.”
iPhone Sells Brilliantly Despite AI Embarrassments
The reasoning: Apple has not lost any revenue or profits due to its lack of major AI investments. The iPhone 17 was “the best product launch ever,” despite the company lagging in AI. Has Cook botched the AI strategy? “Maybe so. Or maybe the man who has created trillions of dollars in stock value still sees a few steps ahead,” Mukunda said.
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In his view, Apple is poised, thanks to Cook's spending discipline, should AI valuations decrease. Apple has $145 billion in cash. “This cash offers flexibility. If AI really takes off [financially], Apple can still buy an AI lab directly. If it's a bubble, no company is better positioned when it bursts.” In fact, the costs for AI are so high that none of the major companies are making profits from it.
John Ternus Focuses on AI
With the iPhone, it's quite different. While Apple's AI problems, such as with Siri, are self-inflicted humiliations. “Customers don't care about that.” Apple sold around 250 million iPhones in 2025 alone. “If customers bought smartphones based on their AI capabilities, this Apple sales boom should never have happened,” writes Mukunda.
This doesn't mean Apple doesn't need to pay attention. But so far, the company is apparently making good progress. For example, the costs that Gemini incurs for Siri are about 20 times lower than what Google pays the company for search advertising in Safari. Nevertheless, Apple seems to grasp the seriousness of the situation. The new CEO, John Ternus, who takes office in September, wants to focus more on AI. And then there's the new Siri AI bootcamp for developers at the company.
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