Siri icon in a datacenter
Perhaps defying Apple’s very public claim that it is using Apple Silicon servers to run Apple Intelligence, an analyst insists the company is now spending $1 billion to buy Nvidia systems as well.
In April 2024, there were the rumors that Apple would use its own Apple Silicon processors to run its AI servers. Then in June 2024, the expectation was that whole data centers would be run on Apple Silicon chips.
By September 2024, it was certain. Apple’s Craig Federighi said its Apple Intelligence servers were on Apple Silicon, and that this was crucial to making the company’s AI services private.
Yet now according to Loop Capital analyst Ananda Baruah — as spotted by Investor’s Business Daily — Apple is in the process of spending around $1 billion to order in new Nvidia servers specifically for generative AI.
“AAPL is officially in the large server cluster Gen AI game and SMCI [Super Micro Computer] & Dell are the key server partners,” he wrote in a note to investors. “While we are still gathering fuller context, this appears to have the potential to be a Gen AI LLM (large language model) cluster.”
Baruah claims that Apple is buying 250 Nvidia NVL72 servers at a cost of between $3.7 million and $4 million each.
According to Nvidia, its NVL72 server contains 36 Grace CPUs and 72 Blackwell GPUs. The company also says that, as of March 18, 2025, that this server is not yet available.
Doubtlessly Apple could pre-order the servers now, and it’s not surprising that the company sees a need to expand its servers. Given the quantities, this may be for development purposes, and not public-facing, but there’s no way to tell right now — and that’s assuming the report is correct.
If it’s for more than development, this just doesn’t quite fit with Federighi’s claim that he thinks using Apple Silicon servers “sets a new standard for processing in the cloud in the industry.”
“Building Apple Silicon servers in the data center when we didn’t have any before [and] building a custom OS to run in the data center was huge,” he said. “[Creating] the trust model where your device will refuse to issue a request to a server unless the signature of all the software the server is running has been published to a transparency log was certainly one of the most unique elements of the solution — and totally critical to the trust model.”
