From Asymco:

But that all changed with AI. Amazon is spending $200 billion this year on AI data centers. Google, $185 billion. Microsoft, $114 billion. Meta, $135 billion. Combined: $650 billion. [Not including OpenAI, Anthropic and SpaceX/XAI.] That is like buying the US Navy every year. And yet Apple’s capital budget is still a modest $14 billion, oscillating with new hardware tooling cycles.

This logic is akin to Hanlon’s Razor: “Don’t attribute to malice that which can be attributed to incompetence”.

This was not a strategic move by Apple, but one that does appear to be lining up decently for Apple. If AI is being commoditized by OpenAI, Google and Anthropic amongst others, renting one of the best models for 1B/year is a steal.