The Information is out with an interesting report about how Apple has considered spinning up its own developer cloud services, in a move that would put it against some of its competitors’ biggest revenue streams. Here are the details.
Project ACDC
As reported by Aaron Tilley, Apple’s Project ACDC (which stands for Apple chips in data centers) would not be that different from Amazon’s AWS, Microsoft’s Azure, or Google’s Cloud Platform:
“The idea discussed was for Apple to rent out servers running on Apple’s own chips, said three people involved in the effort. That reflects Apple’s successful development of its own chips, which have given its phones and laptops a big edge over rival devices—and which are also now being used in Apple’s data centers for some artificial intelligence services.”
According to the report, Apple has considered this in the “past few years”, and would offer the service as a cheaper and more efficient in-house alternative to other cloud competitors.
The internal path to ACDC
One big reason Apple was even entertaining the idea is performance. Executives believed Apple silicon could offer better AI inference performance at a lower cost, especially as demand ramps up for efficient, high-volume AI workloads:
Apple’s chips are efficient at running many types of inference, which means using pre-trained AI models to interpret new information, such as computer vision found in the Vision Pro.
Apple started using its own chips inside its data centers with the launch of Private Cloud Compute (the system that powers server-side requests for Apple Intelligence), then expanded it to the Siri team:
“Siri was the first team to try out servers powered by Mac chips for text-to-speech capabilities. The servers provided a performance improvement in accuracy and cost reduction compared to traditional servers with Intel chips, said people involved in the project.”
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