The CEO of Intelligent Alpha has a clear thesis for 2026: personal AI is the dominant theme, and two Mag-7 giants are best positioned to own it.
“You have to look at Google and Apple. And for a very specific reason. It’s personal AI, which I think will be the biggest theme in AI this year. Personal AI is an AI that you think of it as the Siri that we all wish we had.”
That quote cuts right to the heart of it. Not the AI that writes your emails or generates images. The AI that knows you, lives on your device, and becomes the operating layer between you and everything else. The Siri we all wish we had.
Why Google and Apple Win Personal AI
Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL | GOOGL Price Prediction) has the data infrastructure and the model quality. The Gemini app now has 750M+ monthly active users and processes over 10 billion tokens per minute. Google’s search business generated $63.07 billion in Q4 2025, and CEO Sundar Pichai framed it well on the earnings call: “Search saw more usage than ever before, with AI continuing to drive an expansionary moment.” Google Cloud is now running at an annualized rate of over $70 billion. The company is committing $175 to $185 billion in CapEx for 2026, nearly doubling last year’s spend. That is not a company hedging its bets.
Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) has something Google cannot easily replicate: the device. With 2.5 billion+ active devices in the installed base and iPhone posting its best quarter ever at $85.27 billion, Apple sits at the intersection of hardware, software, and personal data in a way no one else does. Apple Intelligence is still early, but the distribution moat is unmatched. Tim Cook called it “unprecedented demand.” Services hit an all-time high of $30.01 billion in the same quarter, showing the monetization engine is already humming.
The Infrastructure Plays Behind It All
The Intelligent Alpha CEO also flagged the infrastructure layer. “Companies like GE, Vistra, those are still players that will benefit from the AI trade and the data center buildout, because some of these big tech companies are going to have to fund their own buildouts at this point.”
GE Aerospace (NYSE:GE) reported full-year 2025 revenue of $45.86 billion with a backlog of roughly $190 billion. Vistra (NYSE:VST) locked in a 20-year nuclear PPA with AWS for 1,200 MW and a separate deal with Meta covering over 2,600 MW. These are not speculative bets. These are contracted cash flows tied directly to the AI buildout.
The personal AI race is about who owns the layer closest to you. Google has the intelligence. Apple has the device. And behind both of them, the power grid is being quietly locked up by the infrastructure players smart money is still watching.
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