Apple reportedly intends to invest billions of dollars to take its rightful place in the race for generative artificial intelligence. And this requires a massive order of specialized servers for the computations necessary for the in-house language model.
According to Ming-Chi Kuo, who is usually well-versed in Apple's behind-the-scenes, the company intends to acquire 2,000 to 3,000 AI servers this year, and 18,000 to 20,000 units in 2024! This represents 1.3% and 5% of global deliveries, respectively. Apparently, Apple has done what all other companies have done and set its sights on Nvidia servers equipped with specialized HGX H100 GPUs.
At list price, a unit costs $250,000: Apple could therefore gobble up $620 million in 2023, and $4.75 billion in 2024! We can imagine that in view of the order, the manufacturer will get a small discount, but it's not even certain: demand is very strong and Apple is following other companies that were quicker to pull out the checkbook.
Even if the volumes are impressive, Apple's AI computing capabilities will still be a notch below those of Meta, which plans to buy 40,000 servers next year. Ming-Chi Kuo indicates that Apple could develop its own servers, but there is no visibility on this project at this time.
These servers will be used to train the company's large language model (LLM), called Ajax, which will support Apple's future generative AI services and features. Siri could be one of the first to take advantage of this, but it will be several months before we see the first effects.