The Tame Apple Press is having issues reconciling the fact that its favourite company is still sitting out the costly race to build AI models and infrastructure.
The latest theory is that the iPhone maker has a cunning plan to be a kingmaker among tech rivals who want to shove their expensive AI tech onto its increasingly dull iPhone cash cow.
This week, Job’s Mob made its biggest AI move yet with a deal to use Google’s Gemini models for iPhone features and to spruce up Siri.
The agreement is structured as a cloud computing contract and could mean Job’s Mob pays Google several billion dollars over time, according to a person familiar with the deal.
The tie-up lands as a slap in the face for OpenAI, which has been integrating ChatGPT with “Apple Intelligence” since 2024, hoping that would put it in front of millions of iPhone users. Job’s Mob said the Google deal does not affect the existing ChatGPT integration.
Deepwater Asset Management analyst Gene Munster, who has always supported Apple, claimed the outfit would kill off OpenAI development and give $5bn to Google .
“I think that the ChatGPT integration is going to die on the vine… having two large models, given the economies of scale, wouldn’t make a ton of sense for Apple. There is a political part: when [former top Apple designer] Jony Ive was hired by OpenAI [to create a hardware device in May last year], that changed the tide.”
The Google deal puts a spotlight on Job’s Mob’s careful spending, despite chief executive Tim Cook promising in October to increase overall AI investment “significantly”.
Apple kept investment in physical infrastructure at roughly three per cent of revenue for the past five years. Since ChatGPT landed in 2022, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta have committed to spending hundreds of billions of dollars on new AI data centres.
Job’s Mob spent $12.7bn on property, plant and equipment in its 2025 financial year, while Google is expected to spend roughly $90bn in its own financial year.
The Gemini move echoes the deal from two decades ago that made Google search the default on Apple devices, in return for a cut of advertising revenue. That arrangement grew to be worth about $20bn a year to Job’s Mob.
OpenAI declined to comment, but a person close to the company said it had taken “a conscious decision to not become the custom model provider for Apple” in the autumn of last year and instead focused on building its own AI device.
While the Tame Apple Press seems happy with all that, Job’s Mob’s skinny AI spending has rattled some investors, particularly the cocaine nose jobs of Wall Street types who hate being told patience is a virtue. Early AI features have faced delays and glitches, even with a noisy Siri overhaul.
Others are fretting about an AI bubble from too much infrastructure spending, while Job’s Mob’s shares have gained more than 12 per cent over the past 12 months.
For those not in the know, Apple is also unusual among its peers in buying most of its cloud infrastructure from third parties, even as it builds “Private Cloud Compute” to process AI queries securely.
Job’s Mob has focused on smaller, more specific models that can run locally and do jobs like text summarisation, which looks neat until users expect magic.
Its research and development spending has hovered at about 8 per cent of revenue for the past three years, but it has bled staff to rivals offering eye-watering pay, including Ruoming Pang, Tom Gunter, and Mark Lee, who have moved to Meta.
