The AI IPO tsunami on the stock market has only recently gotten under way, with SpaceX’s more-than-$2 trillion IPO likely to be followed in several months by OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s IPOs — each of which is likely to hit $1 trillion.

That will mint three new trillion-dollar AI companies in a matter of months, all of which compete with Microsoft. 

Wall Street has never seen anything like it. Previously, the most money raised by all IPOs in a single year was $671 billion in 2021. It took 38,644 deals to get to that figure. Compare that to three deals this year that by themselves will likely total $4 trillion.

The numbers are eye-popping. 

For Microsoft though, it’s not the numbers themselves that are important. It’s what will happen to the company once it as three newly minted trillion-dollar AI competitors. Until recently, when it came to AI, Microsoft was king of the hill. But can it keep that place?

Microsoft’s weakened position

The IPOs come at a particularly fraught time for Microsoft. At one point, it was the most valuable AI company in the world, with a big head start on the tech industry.

No longer. Microsoft’s stock price has tanked in the past 12 months, even as the S&P index has soared. In the last year, Microsoft’s stock price has dropped 24%, while the S&P has jumped 24%. The two were pretty much in sync until last fall..

Microsoft has fared even worse against its most powerful AI competitor, Google. In June 2025, Google’s total value was $2.1 trillion, well behind Microsoft’s  $3.57 trillion. By  mid-June this year Google was worth $4.5 trillion, Microsoft, $2.8 trillion. That’s entirely due to Google’s AI push and Microsoft’s failure to improve Copilot significantly.

Matt Vellosso, who worked for Microsoft for 14 years — including four as technical advisor to CEO Satya Nadella and then as Partner Director for fostering AI innovation in Windows before leaving in 2023 — is scathing about what he views as Microsoft’s AI failures. 

He warned: “Microsoft missed the internet wave, the mobile wave and now it missed the AI wave.”

Show me the money

The most immediate likely impact on Microsoft after the three massive IPOs take place will be on the company’s stock price, which could well take another hit. Investors don’t want to miss out on the AI boom, and until now, there’s been a relatively small number of companies in which they could. When Anthropic and OpenAI join SpaceX as publicly traded companies, investors will have three more choices than they did only a few months ago. That could make it tougher for Microsoft to attract AI-focused investors. And that, in turn, could knock down its stock price. 

A lower stock price means the company will have a harder time raising money when it needs it. In addition, Microsoft won’t be able to as easily buy other companies in stock-only deals, because the value of its stock will be less.

Still, the IPOs are not all bad news for Microsoft’s stock position. It does, after all, own 27% of OpenAI. So if OpenAI is valued at $1 trillion after its IPO, Microsoft has a $270 billion stake in it.

Thumbs up for increased Azure revenue

One area where these mega IPOs should be unalloyed good news for Microsoft is in Azure revenue, which should significantly. Microsoft’s final divorce settlement with OpenAI requires the latter to buy $250 billion in Azure services through 2030. And its  estimated trillion-dollar valuation ensures the company will be around for the long term, meaning Microsoft can count on that revenue — and possibly more on an ongoing basis.

Microsoft will likely also get tens of billions of dollars from Anthropic for Azure cloud services. Anthropic might spend $43 billion annually on Azure cloud services by 2030, according to estimates by HSBC, one of the world’s largest banking and financial services companies.

Thumbs down for the effect on Copilot

Although Azure use will boom thanks to the IPOs, Microsoft’s own Copilot could face significant competition at a time when it’s having serious problems gaining traction. In its April 2026 earnings call, the company said Microsoft 365 Copilot had 20 million paid seats. That’s up from 15 million paid seats as of January, but still a minuscule number, considering Microsoft has 450 million Microsoft 365 commercial subscribers. That means only about 4% of the company’s business customers have been willing to pay for it since its launch in late 2023.

Beyond that, developers have been leaving GitHub Copilot and turning to Anthropic’s Claude Code and SpaceX’s recently purchased Cursor. A survey by the software development company JetBrains of more than 10,000 developers found that 29% used GitHub Copilot, 18% used Cursor and 18% used Claude Code. 

Early in 2025, GitHub Copilot had a commanding 67% market share.

More downside than up from the IPOs

Although the IPOs do have some upside for Microsoft — dramatically increased Azure revenue and several hundred billion dollars in OpenAI stock holdings — mostly, they’re bad news thanks to increased competition. 

Unless Microsoft significantly improves Copilot for businesses, developers and consumers, the company’s one-time AI dominance will erode even further.

Forty million UK iCloud users could be owed up to $100 (£77) each after a $3.9 billion (£3 billion) class action lawsuit against Apple was cleared for trial — and the company’s problems may be just getting started. 

For Apple, the worry is that this case could snowball to become yet another existential regulatory problem. The action was brought by consumer group Which?, which accused Apple of breaching UK competition law by giving its iCloud storage service preferential treatment and “trapping” customers with Apple devices into using iCloud. 

Trapping happy customers

Apple achieves this by encouraging its customers to sign up to iCloud for storage of photos, videos and other data while also making it difficult for them to use alternative providers to backup key data. The company also squeezes extra dollars out of customers by providing a stingy 5GB of storage for free, while putting important data including messages and photos inside that allocation. Even Google provides 15GB of storage in its free tier.

The problem is that the scale of Apple makes it difficult for competitors to reach customers with alternative solutions, while Apple’s control over the operating system gives it integration advantages third-party competitors don’t get. 

While there may well be justifications for constraining access to some personal data, those privacy and security challenges don’t apply to all of it. 

You are the product

When it originally filed the claim, Which? explained that Apple could resolve the claim without litigation by offering consumers their money back and opening up iOS to allow users a real choice for cloud services. This is unlikely to happen.

This case has been slowly making its way through the Competition Appeal Tribunal, which last week finally gave permission for the case to go to trial.

Apple won’t be looking at a hefty fine just yet. The first available trial date is in October 2028 and the legal fight is expected to last nine weeks, which might, or might not, equate to a Christmas surprise for Apple’s then CEO. There’s no time to sit back, however, as the company must still file its defense papers with the court by the end of next month, July 31.

The snowball factor

The UK is not alone. Italy has launched its own antitrust probe into Apple’s iCloud dominance under the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA). The problem with that litigation is that since Italy has commenced the probe, other nations across the bloc might also act.

Italy is looking to see whether Apple has failed to open up its iOS and iPadOS ecosystems to rival cloud services, arguing that third-party providers are unable to access the same system components as iCloud. The DMA insists competitors should enjoy the same degree of access as iCloud because Apple is seen as a gatekeeper, which means it is required to meet a higher set of standards.

Apple, of course, will inevitably — and rightly — argue that customer privacy needs to be protected, and that open, free, access to some of the data its trusted iCloud service can use is not in the consumer interest. 

The company has already proposed one way in which it can provide third-party services with access to confidential data with a trusted intermediary system that anonymizes that information in use. 

Why we need a Trusted System Agent model

That’s precisely what it offered Europe when it proposed a solution called Trusted System Agent — an intermediary that would allow virtual assistants to safely access the same features and capabilities as Siri AI for devices in the EU. Unfortunately, EU regulators didn’t accept Apple’s justification concerning the need to protect customer privacy, which is why Apple Intelligence won’t be available in Europe for a while, if at all.

In the event Apple’s iCloud service falls short of the Italian probe and therefore the DMA, the danger is that if EU regulators take the same evangelically hard-line stance with iCloud services as they have done so far with AI, customers might find themselves losing access to the service. 

First blood

That’s in Europe, of course. But the UK case is likely to get to court long before litigation processes in Europe get going, making the UK action an important test case in which yet another important component of Apple’s offering to consumers is up for trial.

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Not-yet-profitable AI companies are constructing a vast and expensive global network of server farms to support cloud-based generative AI (genAI) services. Deeply financed by venture capitalists who will one day want to see return on their investments, these centers are consuming enough memory to drive consumer technology prices higher and higher.

Yet, for all the investment now going on, it’s inevitable that new on-device genAI models will emerge. When they do, the AI tasks for which you use cloud services today will be handled on device tomorrow. And at the speed we’re going, tomorrow is not very far away.

We already know it is possible. Just look at Siri AI. To create it, Apple worked with Google Gemini — using the latter to help build and distill Apple’s own AI models, many of which now work entirely on device.

The hidden cost of the AI buildout

This move toward edge AI takes place as the tech industry pours its eggs into the AI basket, with major memory suppliers redirecting manufacturing capacity toward higher-value memory products for AI servers, such as advanced-layer 3D NAND. They’ve done so while failing to invest in additional capacity, prompting a shortage of the kind of general purpose RAM you use in your computer, console, or smartphone.

This is having a dramatic impact. Gartner says the memory shortage will cause PC shipments to drop 10.4% in 2026 and smartphone shipments to decline 8.4%, with prices on those products rising 17% and 13%, respectively, versus 2025 levels.

The AI consumer tech tax

This leaves electronics manufacturers quarrelling over the remaining supply, while shrinking profit margins force them to increase prices. Sony has already raised the PS5 price by $100, Microsoft has raised Xbox prices, and Nintendo has raised the price of its first-generation Switch. Samsung has quietly increased prices across Galaxy smartphones, tablets, and laptops. Analysts also warn that “shrinkflation” is escaping from the supermarket and coming to your tech, an insidious move in which manufacturers quietly reduce the features/performance of their devices to maintain familiar price points. That laptop you purchase could ship with a downgraded display, for example.

Apple is not immune. The iPhone 18 Pro is tipped for a significant price increase in 2026, potentially adding $100 to $150, even before tariffs are considered. Apple CEO Tim Cook recently warned of price increases ahead as a direct impact of demand for memory components.

A business model under pressure

Surely all this investment in AI servers and the increased cost of tech products will be worth it in the end, right? Writer and tech critic Ed Zitron disagrees, pointing out that for $200 a month, a user can burn $8,000 in Anthropic tokens or $14,000 in OpenAI tokens. 

He argues that subsidy at this scale suggests AI economics are already broken, and that the actual value of AI may be inflated, forming a big bad bubble ready to burst once market opinion (and investment) catches on.

By spending billions chasing market share, AI has fundamentally undermined its own value, making it harder to achieve sustainable business success. Costs might well fall in future, of course, but edge AI could be the biggest cost reduction exercise of all.

Make tokens pay

Perhaps AI companies have finally begun turning things around? Maybe not. Less than three months into paying the actual costs of LLM-based services, both OpenAI and Anthropic are considering drastic price cuts, with one Cisco executive stating publicly that AI token costs are far higher than the actual value those tokens are generating at scale.

Even Meta has imposed strict limits on token usage after finding it was on track to spend billions on internal AI alone in 2026. The Times reports that two large banks spent an astonishing $1 billion on AI experiments without seeing any significant return.

That’s the use value, but what about the hardware investment? It is really hard to ignore the irony that billions of dollars are being poured into a server-based infrastructure that might become obsolete before turning any kind of profit. Today’s H200-based servers will need to be upgraded sooner or later, and when they are, where will the money come from? 

Apple has a different approach

Consumer electronics leader Apple clearly sees this. While it has been accused of being behind in AI, perhaps it was just being realistic. After all, the reality seems to be that we’re experiencing something akin to venture capital backed economic socialism in the AI sector, with billions invested for no visible — or, if Zitron is right — possible return. 

At the same time, Apple seems focused on building edge AI as a privacy-preserving, cost-saving alternative to the massive data center buildouts rivals have pursued. 

Rather than squandering billions on a revenue-draining chatbot, Apple worked with others to create its own alternative. As part of its agreement with Google, Apple is using a large version of Gemini to train a smaller, distilled version capable of running locally on Apple hardware.  Siri AI can hold conversations, pull context from a user’s emails, messages, and photos, answer live questions from the web, and act across apps, with much of the work taking place on the device itself.  

These tools are also available to app developers, thanks to Apple’s Foundation Models framework. At WWDC, Apple showed how its devices can work together to run local LLMs using MLX Distributed, which means users can run on-premises, highly private AI models. And the company continues to make strategic acquisitions, such as the recent purchase of on-device AI startup Liquid AI.

On-device or off, the move has caused Apple to break with years of tradition to pack its systems with more and more memory, ironically feeding the same component pricing narrative.

The squeeze isn’t over

Who pays for all this? You do. Memory prices will continue to rise across the year, with TrendForce predicting up to 75% increases on top of the already 100% spike we’ve seen in recent months. Memory suppliers seem unwilling to ramp up supply to help bring costs down, potentially because they don’t want to be left with unused capacity once the AI bubble does burst. That means existing manufacturing is being pointed at the highest value memory components, further feeding price hikes.

When AI leaves the cloud

What happens to investors when AI stops needing a data center to be useful?  The companies that survive this shift won’t necessarily be the ones who built the biggest and most costly clouds. They are more likely to be the ones who identified cloud-based AI as the start of a transition toward more intelligent devices equipped with their own on-device AI. That is precisely what Apple is building toward.

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