Apple sat out AI capex and won anyway

a16z Blog charts writer Moses Sternstein says Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) won by refusing to play the AI capex game.

Hyperscalers lifted capex about 6x to 9x since 2023, per his Nasdaq 30-day attribution, while Apple spent less than before the spree and cut capex as a share of sales by about a third. The payoff was blunt. Apple was the lone Mag7 name beating Nasdaq year-to-date on rolling 7-day averages, per the piece, as semis, neoclouds and AI supply chain dragged the index and Nasdaq pull came from Costco and Walmart. Sternstein says the knitting held, with iPhone revenue rebounding and services compounding at about 13% year over year. That echoes Apollo’s warning that AI has paid little outside tech so far, except Apple got paid for not spending.

Roblox tells the opposite story.

The company said in its Q3 2026 shareholder letter that more than 80% of its top 100 games by hours engaged used AI tools to accelerate creation in the past month, with daily asset uploads tripling month over month. Sternstein, who has argued that AI code output rarely lifts user behavior, says this time users actually played the output, with AI-made titles like Break and Steal an Egg breaking into the top 20 by concurrents. Roblox (NYSE:RBLX) also said creator time in Build, Studio Assistant and external AI via MCP tripled since Q2, daily MCP use grew nearly 5x, and its Build prompt-to-game tool drew more than 500,000 users and 70,000 published games in alpha in New Zealand, Singapore, Serbia and Thailand. SensorTower data cited in the piece shows another user spike after mean reversion, though Sternstein admits he does not know if AI caused it.

Dan Frommer, founder of The New Consumer, supplied the counter to the food doomers with Circana receipt data showing GLP-1 households still spend more on food than average. Store and restaurant spending dip at first, then recover, with dining out slightly above the pre-treatment baseline by mid-year two, according to the data. He says baskets shift toward water, soup, rice, fruit and vegetables and away from sausage, pies and alcohol, with wine as the lone alcohol exception that rises moderately. Candy and frozen treats also rise enough to turn below-average buyers into above-average buyers, which Sternstein flags as possible noise or substitution from cookies and cake.

Sternstein closes with dictionary.com crowning maxxing, up nearly 20x in search since January, while sleepmaxxing peaked last year. Sleepmaxxing means maximizing the quality of your sleep and began swirling on social media a couple of years ago, with gadget-heavy routines drawing pushback, according to United States News Beep. If restraint wins in phones, excess wins in games, and appetite survives weight-loss drugs, who is left to pay for all that capex?