Earlier this year, Bloomberg reported that Apple was looking to host the much-delayed new Siri models on Google servers, rather than Apple’s Private Cloud Compute. The Information is reporting a similar story this morning, saying that Google has been tasked with running Siri servers inside its data centers, while adhering to Apple’s privacy standards.
The Information goes on to detail how Private Cloud Compute is not up to task. As well as being underpowered, it is also reportedly underutilized in its current state, with the company only using about 10% of its capacity on average, leading to some already-manufactured Apple servers to be sitting dormant on warehouse shelves.
The report explains how Apple’s cloud infrastructure is very fragmented. The technologies of different team are run independently, rather than having one centralized pool that any department in the company can draw from.
This leads to inefficiencies where parts of the company’s stack sit idling, while other parts would use the available server capacity, if they could access it. The Apple finance team has apparently been frustrated about the costs of this duplicate infrastructure, but also unwilling to invest billions in overhauling the stack. There has apparently been several attempts inside the company to unify everything, but those projects have stalled several times over the last decade.
For Private Cloud Compute specifically, the system is described as underpowered and perhaps more trouble than it’s worth. Updating the software is apparently trickier and takes time, and more fundamentally the chips (believed to comprise right now of modified M2 Ultra processors) are not powerful enough to run the latest frontier models like Gemini, which the new Siri will be based on.
And as the initial crop of Apple Intelligence features hasn’t been used as much as Apple expected, the Private Cloud Compute buildout is seen in a negative light. While Apple is expecting much higher demand for the new Siri chatbot features whenever they finally land, the current Private Cloud Compute stack does not seem up to the task of running it.
Hence, Apple is in advanced talks with Google to run new Siri inside their data centers instead, a company which already has a lot of experience with mass LLM server buildouts thanks to Gemini. The company already relies on Google’s cloud for some iCloud features, like cloud storage.
The ever-changing landscape of AI may have forced Apple leadership to change their approach to cloud infrastructure, and may invest more heavily in-house going forward, but implementing those changes is a much longer term trajectory.
You can read the full story over at The Information.