A report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman last week indicated that Apple was going to put its own chips in the data center, and a few days later,.
Editor’s take: Of course, Apple is designing its own AI chips for its data centers. This will give them an end-to-end, cloud-to-edge AI system that its competitors will not be able to match anytime soon.
A report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman last week indicated that Apple was going to put its own chips in the data center, and a few days later, the Journal confirmed this with its own reporting. The information was initially met with a high degree of skepticism, particularly from the Journal, which later changed its stance on the subject.
Many said that Apple was « not a cloud company » and did not see the point in them pursuing this path. This struck us as odd since we know Apple has been looking at this for years. Here, we want to lay out some of the reasons we think Apple would want its own data center chip.
Editor’s Note:
Guest author Jonathan Goldberg is the founder of D2D Advisory, a multi-functional consulting firm. Jonathan has developed growth strategies and alliances for companies in the mobile, networking, gaming, and software industries.
For starters, Apple is building a chip because they can. In a world of constrained leading-edge capacity, Apple is TSMC’s largest customer and can presumably get most of the capacity they want. If they actually had a good use for the chip, now is the time. Everyone else is scrambling, and Apple could conceivably build up a big head start.
It should also be clear that Apple is very much a provider of cloud services – they literally have a product called iCloud. Part of the confusion here rests in the fact that Apple says very little about what it does with its data centers. They never make it entirely clear how they deliver their cloud services, which seems to be some combination of Google Cloud, Azure, and maybe some AWS, but also their own data centers.
