Picture the most expensive restaurant you’ve ever been to.
Now imagine every major tech company walks in, sits down, and orders everything on the menu. Twice.
→ Google drops $180-190 billion.
→ Meta slaps down $145 billion.
→ Microsoft and Amazon between them are clearing $300 billion.
The total bill for Big Tech’s 2026 AI infrastructure binge is now north of $700 billion — more than the entire GDP of Switzerland, all of it pointed at data centers, chips, and the existential fear of being the one company that didn’t build enough.
Apple looked at the menu, ordered a side salad, and posted record revenue of $111.2 billion.
iPhone revenue up 20% for the second consecutive quarter.
China — the market everyone had circled in red as Apple’s biggest vulnerability — came in at $20.5 billion against expectations of $18.9 billion.
The stock jumped 5% Friday.
And Apple’s capex for the quarter? $1.9 billion. Down 36% from a year ago.
While every other megacap was shoveling coal into the furnace as fast as humanly possible, Apple spent less than it did last year and somehow came out looking like the smartest person in the room.
The diet is working.
Here’s the story ⇩
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Trump Admin to Pump $1 Billion into this “Off-the-Radar” AI Stock
The U.S. government pumped more than $1 billion into Intel. The stock popped 128%. It pumped $400 million into MP Materials. The stock popped 200%. It bought 10% of Trilogy Metals. The stock popped 500%. And now, Trump has chosen this AI stock for a $1 billion payday.
The Menu…
Everyone ordered the same thing. More and faster and bigger.
→ Amazon up 77% on capex year over year.
→ Alphabet up 107%.
→ Microsoft up 85%.
The purple line at the bottom didn’t move. That’s Apple. It also had the best week of anyone at the table.
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Tesla is shipping thousands of strange white crates to critical locations across America.
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He says they are part of a new “super startup” that has nothing to do with electric vehicles, space, social media, crypto, biotech, robots or AI…
But it could go down as Elon’s greatest ever disruption…
The Buffet Has a Two-Speed Problem
Google and Meta both reported earnings Wednesday. Both beat expectations. Both raised their already enormous capex forecasts.
→ Alphabet up 6%,
→ Meta down nearly 9% — which tells you everything about what Wall Street actually thinks is going on beneath the surface.
Here’s the difference.
1 Google isn’t just spending on AI infrastructure — it’s selling AI infrastructure.
Those tensor processing unit chips it’s been building for internal use?
Google confirmed this week it’s going to start delivering them to outside customers, with Meta reportedly already in line.
Analysts have estimated that business alone could be worth $900 billion. Google Cloud grew 63% last quarter to over $20 billion in revenue. So when Google raises its capex forecast, it has a receipts to show for it.
2 Meta raised its forecast to $145 billion and when Morgan Stanley asked Mark Zuckerberg directly what signposts he’s watching to make sure that spend generates a return, he said something about building experiences for billions of people and monetizing at scale. Which is technically an answer. It’s just not the answer the question was asking for. And then the cherry on top — daily active users across Meta’s apps dipped for the first time since 2019. First time since 2019. While Meta is committing to its biggest infrastructure spend ever.
Google is building the restaurant and charging everyone rent. → Meta is the customer who keeps ordering more food while telling you the bill will sort itself out eventually.
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Former CIA consultant Dr. Mark Skousen believes June 2026 a potential SpaceX IPO announcement could take place.
He found an “access code” that could let you get exposure ahead of it.
Learn how to claim your stake before time runs out.
The Most Expensive Family Dinner in History
Tesla’s amended annual filing dropped this week and it is genuinely one of the more fascinating documents in recent corporate history if you’re into the kind of thing where one billionaire’s companies spend half a billion dollars buying from each other.
Here’s the web.
→ xAI paid Tesla $430 million last year, mostly for Megapack battery storage.
→ SpaceX spent $143 million on Tesla products — a big chunk of that almost certainly the $100 million worth of Cybertrucks it purchased in Q4, which works out to roughly one in five Cybertrucks registered in the US that quarter being bought by Musk’s own rocket company.
→ Tesla then invested $2 billion in xAI, which merged with SpaceX, which means Tesla now owns a piece of SpaceX.
! The company that sold batteries to the AI startup that merged with the rocket company that bought the trucks now has equity in all of it
source: sherwood
Meanwhile the Tesla Semi finally rolled off the high-volume production line in Sparks, Nevada — about nine years after Elon Musk first unveiled it, with production targets missed in 2019, 2020, and several years after that. It’ll run you $260,000 for standard range or $290,000 for long range. Tesla is targeting 50,000 units per year. Frito-Lay has been testing it since 2022 and presumably has opinions.
Tesla’s CFO also confirmed capex will exceed $25 billion this year, pushing free cash flow negative for the rest of 2026.
The stock dropped 7% last week, recovered about 2% this week, and Elon Musk’s disclosed 2025 compensation came in at $158 billion — entirely in equity, none of it actually realized, all contingent on targets that weren’t hit, so his actual realized pay was zero.
The gap between $158 billion and zero is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
So What Does the Side Salad Mean?
Apple has real problems ahead — margin pressure from the global memory shortage, a CEO transition from Tim Cook to John Ternus in September, a foldable iPhone in the pipeline, and an AI strategy that is currently best described as “we’re working on it.” WWDC on June 8 is when that story either starts making sense or gets more complicated.
But here’s what this week actually showed: you can skip the $700 billion infrastructure arms race, partner with Google for your AI, spend 36% less than you did last year, and still post record revenue while your stock tests all-time highs.
Apple isn’t winning because of its AI strategy.
It’s winning despite not having one yet.
That’s either the most impressive thing in tech right now, or the calm before something gets very awkward in June.
Either way, the side salad is still on the table.
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