Apple Starts Shipping Made-in-America AI Servers Early

[name99]

Ollama is 100% private, running in your hardware, while you then went on to describe handing everything off to Apple’s servers… as if that was an improvement??..

You clearly don't understand what Apple is trying to achieve with Private Cloud Compute. Even though it's there in the name!

Private Cloud Compute: A new frontier for AI privacy in the cloud - Apple Security Research

Secure and private AI processing in the cloud poses a formidable new challenge. To support advanced features of Apple Intelligence with larger foundation models, we created Private Cloud Compute (PCC), a groundbreaking cloud intelligence system designed specifically for private AI processing...

security.apple.com

 

[seek3r]

Lots of Apple Intelligence fans in this thread.

Do you truly believe it's good now just because final assembly of some server hardware is taking place in your home country?

I think there are two issues you're conflating:
1) Americans are happy that Apple is investing at home
2) AI might get better as these servers, no matter where they're built or run, come online

 

[name99]

Where are the servers for EU customers? Where are the AI tools for EU customers?
Where is the support of languages for all EU customers?

Apple need to ship this as well!

Biting the hand that feeds you...

This is peak EU -- piss on Apple for three years via legal warfare, then complain that Apple doesn't treat them like kings.

 

[roklanhavok]

Interesting that they would mention that they have specific servers being made. Acknowledging that is the first step toward selling them to customers. And with the recent container support in MacOS, that's another hint that something might be coming.

 

[keksikuningas]

I wonder what hardware is inside. probably running linux but I wouldn't be terribly surprised if it turned out it's running some sort of BSD

 

[TexStones]

Oh I need a job as I quit today and live in Houston. Let me see what it pays…lol.

Just look for the jobs tagged "Houston" here: https://foxconnggroup.applytojob.com/apply/

 

[SouthernApple]

Oh I need a job as I quit today and live in Houston. Let me see what it pays…lol.

You quit... without having another job already lined up?

 

[mdriftmeyer]

This. Apple currently has a decent moat around its ecosystem. They basically have about two years to figure out how to add enough AI to its ecosystem to prevent someone like OpenAI from developing a competing OS/ecosystem/hardware portfolio that will meaningfully pull market share away.

No amount of time will allow OpenAI to become a major OS player in any market. First, it is Linux. Second, Linux is Linus. And finally, refer to my second point.

 

[rezwits]

Ollama is 100% private, running in your hardware, while you then went on to describe handing everything off to Apple’s servers… as if that was an improvement??..

If you use the Ollama Cloud (paid) to be able to use "LARGE", language models like 256GB, it's not completely private, yes the "small" local LLMs too, and we can do other "small" LLMs locally to, but if you use the Ollama Cloud there is no guarantee that search history and caching is CLEAN... i.e. 100% Private

But using an AI service like Ollama, can be the future, but then this turns to can we trust them and if you don't trust Apple more?
Why are you...

I get confused at to why people said there is no way Apple can do it.
But then Ollama has a "trust us" system, and everyone does... stupid..

NOTE: Also from my research (ai included) it has said it's not 100% so... maybe that's changed?

 

[SFjohn]

What is known about the silicon?

Silicon - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[jagooch]

It's a good first step.

Yep. It’s going to take time to undo decades of “off-shoring” of manufacturing. I honestly expected a 4 - 5 year wait for factories to be built and staffed. Hearing something in 2025 was a complete shock.

It’s like being told you need to invest for 30 years to be ready for retirement , and being halfway there in the first year.

 

[picpicmac]

Does Apple assemble using components from America or China?

You do realize that electronics components are made all around the world, don't you?

A component could be made in Malaysia... or Indonesia... or Taiwan... or Vietnam... or even Mexico, Israel, or Brazil.

 

[picpicmac]

It’s going to take time to undo decades of “off-shoring” of manufacturing.

Why would you want that?

What is it with economic nationalism that draws so many to it?

And, why isn't this thread in the Politics sub-forum?

 

[seek3r]

I wonder what hardware is inside. probably running linux but I wouldn't be terribly surprised if it turned out it's running some sort of BSD

I suspect it’s running XNU/Darwin, Apple has their own OS already optimized for their chips, they definitely use Linux and maybe BSDs in other places, but this use case is tailor made for Apple running their own OS

 

[falainber]

You do realize that electronics components are made all around the world, don't you?

A component could be made in Malaysia... or Indonesia... or Taiwan... or Vietnam... or even Mexico, Israel, or Brazil.

Just not in USA

 

[falainber]

Why don't they report how much this facility cost? Based on the available information - not so much. Probably way less than $1B. Is Apple going to build thousand facilities like this one? The $600B number sounds bogus to me.

 

[svish]

Good to see some form of manufacturing in the US even though they are not consumer products. Expecting Apple to make more products in the US in the future.

 

[ducknalddon]

Expecting Apple to make more products in the US in the future.

I'm not. At most you may get some token facilities like this to keep the politicians happy. Wages are far too high in the US to contemplate low value work like manufacturing.

 

[hans1972]

Yep. It’s going to take time to undo decades of “off-shoring” of manufacturing. I honestly expected a 4 - 5 year wait for factories to be built and staffed. Hearing something in 2025 was a complete shock.

It’s like being told you need to invest for 30 years to be ready for retirement , and being halfway there in the first year.

It's low volume assembly of non-consumer electronics for internal use.

It's like growing vegetables for yourself and your extended family vs supplying the whole country.

And Apple needs help. Not one of those on-the floor factory workers are Apple employees.

 

[jagooch]

Good to see some form of manufacturing in the US even though they are not consumer products. Expecting Apple to make more products in the US in the future.

Agreed. When manufacturing got offshored, the people at the top made more money because labor was cheaper, then people at the bottom got less money plus it took jobs from the countries citizens. So you get a wider disparity between incomes, not to mention downward pressure on wages . Also, fewer jobs + more applicants also lowers wages ( supply and demand).

You could also look at it as reducing dependence on other countries for critical goods. AI is going to as important as fuel, water and electricity soon, and being dependent on other countries for it gives them undue sway over you. Looking back into history for parallels, the Roman Empire depended on Egypt for grain, which is why it was a popular target for attack. Great Britain also imported tons of food and other critical goods from it's colonies circa WW2. They were dependent on shipments from the US in the early years of the war when their shipping lanes were blocked. Just a couple of examples of where dependence can be a bad thing.

o/c , cutting off another country can be a double-edged sword. If you huge part your GDP or perhaps an important import comes from that country, you might not want to cut them off . This is getting into the weeds of trade strategies, and I'm completely unprepared to make any comments on that topic. I'll let people who do it for a living handle it!

 

[Frantisekj]

Is there any feature already using this private cloud?

IDK but it sounds very close to Apple Private Relay, Apple paid service. Looks like Apple may is looking to monetize AI.

 

[Frantisekj]

Jobs was always about the user experince and Apple seems to be losing this focus. They are so far behind the AI game that they either need to buy OpenAI to stay relevant or pull out a miracle.

They are trying:

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/fastvlm-has-apple-made-secret-ai-achievement.2469406/

 

[name99]

No amount of time will allow OpenAI to become a major OS player in any market. First, it is Linux. Second, Linux is Linus. And finally, refer to my second point.

You have no idea what OpenAI's long term goals are... Others do.
The article below is dense and requires some thought (in part because it's actually saying something genuinely original, not just repeating what you've heard a million times).

Routers, Apps, AGI

Plus! Diff Jobs; Peripheral Bets; Fragmentation and Industry Maturity; Deepfakes as Pull Quotes; Benchmarks; Platforms

www.thediff.co

It took time, but MS replaced IBM as *the* "business computer company".
It took time, but Google kinda replaced MS as *the* "business computer company" (still on-going).
It took time, but OpenAI...

Obviously
- a large part of each change was not doing what the earlier company did, but adding new functionality.
MS didn't do payroll and batch processing, what it did was Word and Excel (and then from that base move sideways to things like SQL Server and Azure).
Google started with the apparently very different space of "finding information", then moved sideways to things like mail, and GDocs.
- you miss the point in each case if you assume that "business computing" means ONLY what it meant over the past decade. It starts with a competitor offering an augmentation to existing "business computing", then after that grows like crazy, they expand sideways into more traditional (by the standards of the previous decade) business computing.

 

[saboteur]

“Made in America” an “Privacy” in the same sentence 🤣🤣🤣

 

[TexStones]

Interesting that they would mention that they have specific servers being made. Acknowledging that is the first step toward selling them to customers.

No. These are simple rackmount boxes designed to enclose a circuit board(s), power supply, network interface, and possibly some unique cooling. In all likelihood multiple cores or units reside in a 1U rack chassis. They are designed for low cost, simple installation, and remote configuration, and will die in place after years of use in a cold, dark data center, after which they will be disassembled, chipped, and recycled into more servers. There is no possible consumer use case for these devices. (The Mac Mini currently fills the bulk of the server use case needs for many of the same reasons. It is small, easy to manage, and cheap, and can be rack mounted in large numbers.)

There may be an enterprise/workgroup use case for a similar item, but Apple has been down that road before with limited success. Buy me a beer and I'll tell you about server adventures dating back to the AIX/Shiner, a product of which we sold untold dozens.

As an FYI this building in Houston is NOT an Apple facility. It is owned (well, leased) by Foxconn, and staffed with Foxconn employees, many (most?) of them temps. They may be building units designed and ordered by Apple, but it is 100% a Foxconn operation. Additionally, another facility nearby is doing similar work for Nvidia.