Amazon and Apple are two companies taking it conservatively in this bubble. Possibly because they actually have gone through the last bubble with some pain. Microsoft to some degree but they have the luxury of OpenAI.
We are at a point in this bubble where planned capex is approaching theorectical limits of actual energy capacity. Let’s see when they start pumping coal companies because they restart those plants…not even joking.
It's already happening. Coal use in the US was up 15% in H1/25 compared to the previous year. Partially due to a shift from higher prices gas.
Coal retirement in the US is almost entirely driven by economics. If someone needs the power, coal plants will stay open and capacity factor go up.
https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/report/elec_coal_renew.php
Apple is "taking it easy" because of embarrassing ineptitude, not because it's their strategy
It can be both, they're taking it easy meaning they aren't on a hiring spree of "top talent" (like Meta paying 8-9 figures for such) which in turn becomes ineptitude since they aren't betting on it.
Even the labour market for the required skills is absurdly overvalued, if they don't see it as a major priority they won't spend the necessary rates for it.
They don't need the hiring spree if they don't train their own models.
They rolled out search without building a search engine and could've done the same with AI.
AWS is lagging in AI, but not by choice. Their leadership is in an all out panic at the moment trying to catch up.
A lot of folks agree though that the smarter play would have been just just sit more on the sidelines intentionally and wait for the bubble to burst, then buy up stuff cheap in the resulting fire sales. AWS should have just focused on the core compute and storage services, which they do well.
AWS simply doesn’t have the right talent to do well in AI at the moment and the folks they did have mostly fled elsewhere.