Apple's bad blood with Nvidia continues, after decades of fighting
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Siri icon in a datacenter. Apple is ramping up research and development of its own AI chip to reduce its reliance on third-party developers, potentially finally completely ending its decades-long unhappy relationship with Nvidia. In November 2020, Apple announced the M1 chip, its first foray into in-house designed processors for its Mac lineup. The move effectively severed ties between Apple and Intel, the latter responsible for previous processors in Apple's computers.
Now, it seems like Apple is gearing up to reduce its reliance on another third-party developer — Nvidia. Currently, Apple works with Nvidia to power many of the features behind Apple Intelligence. Nvidia currently controls somewhere between 70% and 95% of the market share for AI Chips, Technology Magazine points out. Its position in the market rocketed Nvidia to the top of the most valuable companies. It even eclipsed Apple's top spot, albeit for a brief time, as noted by CNBC.
Interestingly enough, Apple doesn't buy Nvidia chips; rather, it rents access to them from cloud services run by Amazon and Microsoft. But Apple is likely gearing up to sever ties even further by allegedly partnering with Broadcom to design its own AI server chip.
Apple's relationship with Nvidia took off in the early 2000s when the company began using Nvidia's chips in its Macs to improve graphics performance. But even then, the relationship between the companies was strained. Allegedly, during a meeting with a senior Nvidia executive, then-CEO Steve Jobs said that Nvidia products had contained technology copied from Pixar sources told The Information. At the time, Jobs had a controlling stake in the animation studio. The executive pushed back on the idea, but Jobs simply ignored him for the remainder of the meeting.
