Apple built a trillion-dollar business on chips it designs itself. It cannot design the ones its AI needs fast enough, so it is going shopping.
The iPhone maker is hunting for AI chip acquisitions, The Information reported. In recent months it has talked to bankers about deals and approached chip startups to ask if they would sell. That is a rare move for a company that almost never buys big.
The reason is a problem Apple cannot hide. Its own AI servers, which run on internally designed M2 Ultra chips, are struggling. The heavy lifting behind the new, Gemini-powered Siri runs instead on Nvidia chips inside Google’s cloud. Apple tried to use its own machines for the job, and they were not up to it.
The chip that slipped
Apple has a server chip of its own in the works, codenamed Baltra. It was due this year. It slipped. Bloomberg reports that a chip powerful enough to rival Nvidia may not land until 2029, with an M5 Ultra upgrade filling the gap.
