Dive Brief:
- Apple is accelerating its AI efforts as part of a four-year, $500-billion package of U.S.-based investments, the company said Monday.
- The tech giant plans to build a 250,000-square-foot advanced server manufacturing facility in Houston, slated to open in 2026 in support of AI cloud computing goals tied to Apple Intelligence. Apple will also expand its data center capacity in North Carolina, Iowa, Oregon, Arizona and Nevada.
- The investment plan includes funding to bolster in-demand skills. Apple plans to hire around 20,000 people, mostly focusing on silicon engineering, software development, AI and ML experts. It plans to expand an initiative to prepare students for careers in hardware engineering.
Dive Insight:
Apple’s investment comes as the company continues to ramp up AI and generative AI efforts. Initially, the tech giant’s public-facing approach was in stark contrast with a vendor-led race to embed the technology.
“Our M.O., if you will, has always been to do work and then talk about work and not to get out in front of ourselves,” CEO Tim Cook said of Apple’s generative AI exploration during the company’s Q1 2024 earnings call in February 2024.
Internally, Apple developers and engineers were hard at work to bring the technology into the fold, identifying ways to boost computing capacity and train multimodal models. By October, the company released the first set of Apple Intelligence features.
“Apple Intelligence is a breakthrough for privacy and AI with innovations like Private Cloud Compute, which extends the industry-leading security and privacy of Apple devices into the cloud,” Cook said during Apple’s Q1 2025 earnings call in January. Cook said enterprises, like SAP, are using the features to enhance employee and customer experiences.
Apple has been promoting Apple Intelligence on Mac computers. The strategy aims to boost adoption as enterprises refresh their hardware fleets.
“With our latest advances in Apple Silicon and our fastest neural engine ever, customers are able to take advantage of the full capabilities of AI and Mac,” Cook said in January. “We believe we’ve got the best AI PC out there for running workloads.”
Apple is the fourth-largest enterprise PC vendor with a market share of nearly 10%, compared to Dell’s 16%, HP’s 21% and Lenovo’s dominant 26% share, according to Gartner research.
Apple’s AI investment announcement comes in the wake of similar funding plans across big tech, mostly geared at addressing compute capacity constraints.
OpenAI, Oracle, Microsoft and other technology partners kicked off the new year with a $500 billion AI infrastructure push as part of a four-year effort called Stargate, President Donald Trump announced in January.
AWS has sustained hefty levels of infrastructure investment to support AI and cloud. Cloud rival Google highlighted increased spending this year as it similarly expands AI and cloud capacity during an earnings call this month.
Alibaba said it intends to spend at least 380 billion yuan ($52.4 billion) over the next three years to advance cloud computing and AI infrastructure. The investment, unveiled Monday, exceeds Alibaba’s total AI and cloud spending over the past decade, the fourth-largest cloud provider by market share said.