Apple stock (NASDAQ: AAPL) rose about 2% on Tuesday, bucking a tech market still jittery about whether the AI boom will pay off fast enough to justify ballooning spending and lofty valuations.
The divergence is striking because “AI fear” has been dragging on big tech sentiment for weeks, with investors trimming exposure to companies seen as most vulnerable to margin pressure or disruption.
In that backdrop, Apple is starting to trade like a rotation stock: a mega-cap haven with steady cash flows and clearer near-term drivers.
Tech sector jitters and broad AI-driven weakness
The broader setup has been rough for growth tech.
The investors are reassessing the profitability timeline for AI, with fears that heavy capital spending could hit margins before meaningful new revenue arrives, fuelling a pullback across software and data stocks.
Those worries have translated into real valuation damage.
The big tech names have collectively lost hundreds of billions of dollars in market value as AI spending concerns hit valuations, with Apple among the companies that have already taken hits during the selloff.
The unease has not been limited to one corner of the market; it has shown up as a rotation away from high-growth tech toward sectors seen as more defensively positioned.
Yet Apple’s move on Tuesday ran against that grain.
An Investing.com analysis described Apple outperforming the broader tech complex in a way that suggests investors are drawing a distinction between Apple’s hardware-and-services model and peers that are more directly exposed to rapid AI disruption in their core products.
Put simply, the investors appear more comfortable underwriting iPhone upgrades and services subscriptions than trying to handicap who wins the next leg of the AI platform war.
Apple stock: Fundamentals and the rotation bid
Apple’s relative strength is also being underpinned by fundamentals that look unusually “clean” in a messy tape.
Apple’s latest quarter cited revenue of $143.8 billion, iPhone revenue of $85.3 billion, and services revenue of $30 billion, alongside net income of $42.1 billion.
That stability matters in a market questioning near-term returns on AI capex.
The investors may view Apple as more insulated from immediate AI competitive threats, in part because its business is not as dependent on selling AI-driven software seats or cloud capacity at rapidly expanding margins.
Apple is still investing in AI, but the company is not currently framed as the poster child for the most aggressive spending race, which can make it feel “safer” during risk-off rotations.
The key risk, of course, is that “defensive tech” is still tech.
If the broader AI-driven selloff deepens, Apple can be pulled down by index flows and sentiment even with solid execution.
For now, though, Tuesday’s price action suggests a market making a more nuanced call.
AI uncertainty is real, but so is the value of predictable earnings and a product-and-services engine that investors can model without heroic assumptions.
https://invezz.com/news/2026/02/17/why-apple-stock-is-climbing-despite-ongoing-ai-jitters/
