Apple is rumored to be planning to invest nearly $5 billion to purchase tens of thousands of artificial intelligence servers next year in order to boost its generative AI capability.
The tech giant is supposedly planning to spend at least $620 million on servers this year and another $4.75 billion on servers next year. The company could get between 2,000 and 3,000 servers in 2023 and a whopping 20,000 servers in 2024.
Apple To Invest Billions in Generative AI Technology
Rumors suggest that the tech giant will purchase servers that are equipped with NVIDIA's HGX H100 8-GPU for generative AI training. Apple is then believed to be planning to upgrade the servers to B100 in 2024. NVIDIA calls its H100 an AI supercomputing platform and has priced each one at around $250,000.
Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo said that he expects the company will use AI servers to train large language models rather than virtual hosting from other cloud service providers. He argued that the tech giant could develop its own server chips to save on server costs but noted that there has been no evidence to suggest that the company is doing that at this time, as per MacRumors.
While the tech giant seems to be making a massive investment into artificial intelligence, its potential server purchase will fall behind other companies such as Meta and Microsoft. Apple would also need to invest in labor costs, infrastructure, and many others.
Kuo suggests that the company will have to use several billion dollars per year to even have a chance of catching up with its competitors. The analyst added that he was genuinely concerned about the future of Apple's generative AI business if the tech giant spends only a billion dollars a year.
This was a reference to reports that the company is on track to spend that much money every year to develop its generative AI products. While Apple is using AI in its products, it has not yet launched a generative AI product similar to that of OpenAI's ChatGPT or Google's Bard.
Read Also : Google's Artificial Intelligence Advancement Includes Generative AI-Powered Search Engine
Catching Up to Competitors
So far, the tech giant has built its own large language model (LLM) framework, known as Ajax as well as a rumored chatbot that is known internally as Apple GPT. However, neither of these have been incorporated into its products yet, according to CNBC.
There are reports that the tech giant is looking to integrate artificial intelligence into Siri, Messages, and Apple Music. For the latter, the company would use AI to create auto-generated playlists like what Spotify does via its partnership with OpenAI. It is also rumored to be exploring the use of AI in Xcode to assist app developers.
The situation comes as Apple's new job listings suggest that it plans to incorporate AI in multiple products. The tech giant shared several job opportunities that listed specific needs for generative AI in the last few weeks.
One example is a role on the App Store platform that says that Apple is "working on a generative AI-based developer experience platform for internal use and assisting our app development team," said TechCrunch.
