Apple has been making chips for running artificial intelligence (AI) software in data centers, as reported by the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday.
The project, ACDC (Apple Chips in Data Center), has been going on for a few years but doesn’t have a clear timeline yet, according to people who know about it.
The report said, Apple has been working with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. on designing and making the chip, but it’s not sure if they’ve had success.
The Wall Street Journal mentioned that Apple’s chip for servers will probably be used for AI inference, which means it will help AI models make decisions with new data, rather than training them from scratch. Nvidia, a big American chip company, is still leading in training AI models.
In AI, inference is how trained machine learning models figure things out with new data. Big tech companies like Google are also making their own AI inference chips so they aren’t reliant on chip makers.
Experts have said Apple is behind in the AI race compared to rivals like Microsoft, which has spent a lot on AI technology and systems.
In February, CEO Tim Cook said Apple was spending a lot on AI and would make an announcement about it later in the year. Analysts think this announcement might come at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in June.
During Apple’s latest earnings call, Cook said they were still investing in AI. “We believe in the big changes AI can bring, and we think we have some things that make us different in this new era,” he said.
Even though iPhone sales dropped and the revenue went down 4% in the last quarter, Apple’s earnings were better than expected. They also said they were going to buy back $110 billion worth of shares, which made their stock price go up.
