Loop Capital analyst Ananda Baruah says Apple is in the process of placing orders for about US$1 billion in NVIDIA GB300 NVL72 systems, reports Investor’s Business Daily.
That equates to about 250 servers at $3.7 million to $4 million each, he said in a client note. Apple is working with server builders Dell Technologies and Super Micro Computer on its large server cluster to support generative AI applications, Baruah said.
According to NVIDIA, NVIDIA GB300 NVL72 systems offer a liquid-cooled, rack-scale solution connecting 36 NVIDIA Grace CPUs and 72 Blackwell Ultra GPUs in a single 72-GPU NVLink domain that acts as a single massive GPU with a total NVLink bandwidth of 130 TB/s.
“AAPL is officially in the large server cluster Gen AI game … and SMCI & DELL are the key server partners,” he said. “While we are still gathering fuller context, this appears to have the potential to be a Gen AI LLM (large language model) cluster.”
He thinks — and he’s almost certainly right — that Apple’s strategy shift is due to troubles in bringing its AI-enabled Siri digital assistant to market. On March 21, Axios reported that Apple has been hit with a federal lawsuit claiming that the company’s promotion of now-delayed Apple Intelligence features constituted false advertising and unfair competition.
The suit was the latest fallout from the company’s acknowledgment that key features, including an enhanced Siri, won’t ship until far later than originally planned. It specifically highlights a September 2024 ad featuring actor Bella Ramsey touting Siri capabilities that are now delayed.
What’s more, Mike Rockwell, Apple’s head of the Technology Development Group who spearheaded the developer of the Apple Vision Pro, is taking over the Siri team following the “personalized Siri” fiasco/missing Apple Intelligence fiasco, reported Mark Gurman at Bloomberg (a subscription is required to read the article).
He replaces John Giannandrea and will report to Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering. Gurman says Apple CEO has “lost confidence” ion Giannandrea’s ability to “execute on product development.” Giannandrea will now oversee artificial intelligence research and development in general, Gurman adds.
With Rockwell leaving the Technology Development Group, the Vision Pro will now be under the stewardship of Paul Meade, who has run hardware engineering for the Vision Pro under Rockwell. Meade has led hardware development for the spatial computer. He’s one of software chief Craig Federighi’s lieutenants, overseeing the underlying architecture of the company’s operating systems.
