In recent months, while the major technology giants have been investing massively in data centres to arm themselves with artificial intelligence, Apple has stayed on the sidelines, preferring to avoid the surge in capital expenditure. But according to sources in financial circles, Apple has just decided to radically change its strategy. The main reason for this seems to be the difficulties encountered in marketing Siri, its AI-enabled digital assistant. Initially, the company had hoped to launch the AI features at the beginning of the year, having previewed them at its Worldwide Developers Conference last June. Apple had even promoted its AI capabilities in TV commercials. But nothing has gone according to plan. Apple seems to have been very wrong about this project, and there have been numerous postponements and nebulous communication around the release of the new Siri. What’s more, it’s highly likely that a class action lawsuit for misleading advertising will be launched over the communications surrounding the AI capabilities of the iPhone 16.
Apple: a (large) order for Nvidia
Loop Capital analyst Ananda Baruah has just reported that Apple is in the process of placing an order worth around $1 billion for systems based on 250 Nvidia GB300 NVL72 servers (a rack combining 72 NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra GPUs and 36 NVIDIA Grace CPUs). In its misfortune, however, this delay enabled Apple to equip itself with the most advanced NVIDIA systems. The other two winners of this operation are DELL and Supermicro. They are partners with NVIDIA in the deployment of these servers. All the same, this investment is quite an admission of failure at a time when Apple seemed to be seeking to develop its own specialised chips for AI, as Microsoft has done with its Azure Maia, for example.
