Apple buybacks vs the AI giants

por Huda Thomas: Nvidia

Wall Street handed the win to the company that stopped pretending to build the future. Apple closed the week at $5.03 trillion, ahead of Nvidia's $4.93 trillion, and the September quarter explains why. Buybacks at Apple hit $24 billion. Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Oracle pooled together managed $13.6 billion, per a Reuters read of LSEG data. That group number sits 83% below the $81.8 billion from a year prior. Neither Alphabet nor Meta has repurchased a share in 2026, and Amazon's last buyback was 2022. Companies this profitable quit handing capital back so they could pour concrete instead. The capex gap is the part that should stop people cold. Amazon put $77.3 billion into capital expenditures in its latest quarter, generated $42.4 billion of operating cash and raised $48.1 billion in long-term debt to help cover it. Apple's capex came to $2.24 billion, under 3% of Amazon's figure, and Apple still pulled $28 billion in operating cash and returned nearly all of it to shareholders. So the market picked its side. Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft and Amazon shed roughly $665 billion in value in the first session after each reported. Alphabet's slice alone was about $496.5 billion, and that landed in a quarter where Google Cloud revenue grew 103%. Delivering the exact growth the AI trade claimed to want did not save it from the bill. Then the Siri deal, which is where the whole thing gets funny. Apple reportedly sends Google around $1 billion a year to run Gemini inside Siri, terms unconfirmed by both. Google already sends Apple around $20 billion a year to stay the default search on the iPhone. Alphabet built the model, posted negative $9.1 billion of free cash flow last quarter, then rents it back to Apple for a rumored 5% of what it pays for search placement. That one contract is the AI pitch in miniature, and it points somewhere uncomfortable. The assumption was that money flows to whoever builds the smartest model. Apple owns the iPhone, and I don't think anyone holding one cares whose model answers. The builder carries the debt, the depreciation and the power bill. The owner of the customer collects. If that holds, a lot of this capex never earns its money back. Two years out, who looks smarter: Apple, or the five giants who stopped paying shareholders to build the future?