Apple Wants to Enter the AI Inference Market. It Will Have to Swallow Its Pride First.

Apple (AAPL) is thinking about getting back into the server business. According to The Information, it’s developing an enterprise AI server built around its own M8 Ultra chips. The machines would be sold to AI developers, companies, and governments that want to run AI models on their own hardware. It would mark Apple’s first real return to servers since it dropped the Xserve line back in 2011. What makes this especially interesting is who Apple would need to pull it off. The plan reportedly relies on Nvidia’s (NVDA) networking technology to link the chips together. Apple’s own chip-to-chip connection is said to be too slow and costly to work at server scale. So the most self-reliant company in tech would have to lean on Nvidia, a company whose own chips could one day compete against it. That tells you how seriously Apple is considering this market.

A Shift From Its On-Device Bet