Apple struggles with AI, but revenues have nearly reached a billion

Despite a clear difficulty in developing an AI capable of competing directly with the most advanced chatbots of the moment, Apple is poised to surpass one billion dollars in revenues tied to this sector over the course of the year.

This result does not come from developing a superior technology, but from the solid and undisputed dominant position that the company maintains in the mobile devices market.

The iPhone devices actually represent the main vehicle through which consumers access the services offered by OpenAI, Google and other companies, allowing Apple to rake in highly lucrative commissions by acting as a simple intermediary.

Apple Intelligence is behind schedule; meanwhile the company earns one billion

Through the well-known App Store commissions, which typically amount to 30% on subscriptions for the first year and 15% for subsequent years, the California-based company secures steady revenues from generative AI applications.

According to analysis firm AppMagic, in 2025 these apps generated nearly 900 million dollars in commissions for Apple.

Of this substantial figure, about three quarters derive exclusively from subscriptions generated by ChatGPT, followed at a distant second by Grok from xAI, which accounts for about 5%.

Although revenues peaked at 101 million dollars in August 2025 and then registered a natural dip due to a slight drop in downloads of the OpenAI app, the economic trend remains exceptional.

While a billion dollars may seem a marginal fraction of the tech giant’s total revenue, it represents a vital growth engine for the Services division, a segment that investors monitor with great care due to its very high profit margins.

A prudent approach to investing

While competitors spend hundreds of billions of dollars on infrastructure and data centers to train ever-larger language models, Apple keeps a notably lower spend. The corporate strategy focuses on processing data locally on smartphones, leveraging internally designed processors and placing a strong emphasis on user privacy.

This choice reassures shareholders, who appreciate the absence of massive structural investments that could fail to pay off, especially since Apple does not have a cloud infrastructure to resell to third parties in case of excess compute power.

Internal technical limits remain evident, however. Siri, the long-standing voice assistant, appears weak by today’s standards, limited to basic tasks and unable to handle complex conversations or in-depth searches.

This lag has weighed on the company’s balance, culminating in the resignation of the head of AI, John Giannandrea, which occurred last year.

To quickly close this gap, the company has formalized an agreement with Google in January, which provides that the Gemini technology will form the foundations of a new and more capable version of Siri planned for this year.

Defending the hardware ecosystem

The strength of the brand gives Apple the time needed to build a definitive strategy. Google, while offering very advanced features on its Pixel devices, has not managed to convince a significant number of users to give up the iPhone.

Meanwhile, companies like OpenAI are seeking to become independent from other platforms, going as far as to acquire hardware startups founded by former key Apple employees, including the famous designer Jony Ive.

Even Elon Musk has in the past flirted with the idea of producing his own smartphone, only to deny the hypothesis in recent times. Building from scratch a hardware ecosystem and an app store capable of challenging Cupertino’s infrastructure is proving to be a tough undertaking.

Until competitors manage to dent this solid tech enclave, Apple will continue to generate enormous profits, demonstrating that control of the distribution channel carries a significant commercial weight.