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.
A long, unhappy relationship
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.
For its part, Nvidia doesn’t seem to enjoy working with Apple, either. It has viewed Apple as overly demanding, especially for a company that consistently fails to make Nvidia’s top 10 customers.
According to former employees, Apple saw Nvidia as exceptionally difficult to work with. Nvidia’s stock chips were far from energy-efficient and produced a lot of heat, both undesirable qualities for laptops. When Apple approached Nvidia about the prospect of designing custom chips for MacBooks, Nvidia balked at the idea.
Tensions ramped up in 2008 when a faulty graphics chip designed by Nvidia made its way into Apple computers, as well as those created by Dell and HP. The event, dubbed “Bumpgate,” became a driving force for Apple to switch to AMD, eventually playing a role in Apple developing Apple Silicon.
In the 2010s, Nvidia began to suspect that Apple, Samsung, and Qualcomm were using its patented techniques for rendering graphics on their smartphones. Nvidia would go on to demand licensing fees from the suspected offenders.
In 2019, Apple stopped cooperating with Nvidia on drivers for macOS Mojave. Not only did this cut off most future support, but a lack of driver work also prevented more modern cards from working on PCI-E Macs, or on Macs with eGPUs.
It wasn’t as though either company was especially unwilling to work with the other — at least at the development level. Apple developers had told AppleInsider that support for Nvidia’s higher-level cards would have been welcome, and even went as far as praising Nvidia’s engineers.
Allegedly, the change was because someone higher up in the company did not want Nvidia support. By this point, many acknowledged the bad blood between the companies, but no one was quite sure who was responsible for pulling driver support.
Apple’s unwillingness to end the feud
Currently, Nvidia executives maintain that the fight is mostly one-sided. Nvidia told The Information that the company remains open to collaborating with Apple.
As it stands, Apple appears to be aiming to release its own AI processor, codenamed Baltra, in 2026. Baltra is expected to be manufactured by TSMC using its N3P process. Announced in April 2024, the technology is expected to be first seen in the processors for the iPhone 17 Pro.
