Apple's main manufacturing partner Foxconn reported the slowest monthly sales growth since February, raising concerns about the momentum of demand for artificial intelligence AI infrastructure and iPhone.

Foxconn announced sales of 84.9 billion New Taiwan dollars (25.2 billion US dollars) in October, an increase of 8.6%. Analysts expect sales growth of 15% for the current quarter, to 2.13 trillion New Taiwan dollars. Foxconn's small increase in sales seems to confirm Apple's soft holiday season forecast. Foxconn is also an important server assembly partner for Nvidia.

Foxconn and other hardware suppliers are catching up with major technology companies, such as Meta Platforms Inc. and Alphabet Inc.'s Google, in a wave of large-scale server and data center acquisitions. The question is, how long can these expenditures last without a killer artificial intelligence application proving the rationale for massive infrastructure investment.

However, the total capital expenditures of the four major internet and software companies Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, and Alphabet this year are expected to far exceed $200 billion, reaching a record high. The executives of these four companies told investors this week that they will continue to invest next year, and even increase the scale.