GoKawiilDuring the WWDC26 keynote, Apple announced its third generation of Apple Foundation Models (AFM), comprising five models, some of which are local, some of which are cloud-based, and one of which lives in Google’s servers running on Nvidia chips. Here’s a breakdown of how that will work.
A bit of background
When Apple first announced its foundation models in 2024, the lineup included an on-device language model with roughly 3 billion parameters, and “a larger server-based language model available with Private Cloud Compute and running on Apple silicon servers,” as the company put it at the time.
Private Cloud Compute was an ambitious undertaking, as it aimed to deliver cloud-based AI capabilities while preserving the same privacy guarantees users expect from on-device processing.
For this reason, keeping everything in-house was essential. Private Cloud Compute ran in Apple data centers, on servers powered by Apple silicon. Even so, its privacy guarantees could be independently verified by third-party security researchers.
However, as Apple struggled to get its AI aspirations off the ground, the company partnered with Google to use Gemini as the backbone of its new AI efforts, the results of which it announced earlier this week during the WWDC26 keynote.
Apple’s new foundation models
The third generation of AFMs includes five models: AFM 3 Core and AFM 3 Code Advanced, which are on-device models, and AFM Cloud, ADM 3 Cloud (Image), and AFM 3 Cloud Pro, which are server-based. The D in ADM 3 Cloud (Image) stands for diffusion, a technology we’ve covered in the past here.
Except for AFM 3 Cloud Pro, all other models were built to run on Apple silicon devices. AFM 3 Cloud Pro, meanwhile, runs on NVIDIA GPUs hosted in Google Cloud.
This was made possible afer Apple extended its Private Cloud Compute architecture to third-party infrastructure for the first time, “while maintaining Apple’s powerful security and privacy protections,” according to the company.
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