Apple testing Amazon’s AI chips to pre-train Apple Intelligence models

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Apple uses Amazon Web Services’ custom artificial intelligence chips to power its search services. The company is also evaluating if it can use Amazon’s latest AI chips to pre-train Apple Intelligence models.

Apple’s Benoit Dupin, senior director of machine learning and AI, made these revelations in a surprise appearance at Amazon’s annual AWS re:Reinvent conference.

Custom AWS AI chips deliver up to 50% efficiency improvement

It is rare for Apple to openly talk about and praise one of its suppliers or vendors. During his appearance, Dupin revealed that Apple has been using Amazon Web Services to power its cloud services, such as iCloud, Apple Maps, and Siri, for more than a decade.

The executive highlighted that using Amazon’s custom chips led to a 40% efficiency gain. Due to these benefits, Apple is considering using AWS’ custom AI chips to pre-train its proprietary AI models.

Interestingly, AWS CEO Matt Garman even revealed to CNBC that Apple came to Amazon and asked how it could help them build their generative AI capabilities and the required infrastructure for this.

Dupin notes that “In early stages of evaluating Trainium2 we expect early numbers up to 50% improvement in efficiency with pretaining.”

Apple Intelligence will continue using Apple silicon-powered Private Cloud Compute

At the AWS Summit, Amazon announced the general availability of its Trainium2 chips for training and deploying LLMs (large language models). A single Trainium2-powered EC2 instance is equipped with 16 T2 chips. This enables one instnace to deliver up to 20.8 petaflops of compute performance.

Note that Apple only plans to use Amazon’s custom AI chips to pre-train its AI models. It will not use them to power Apple Intelligence features. For the latter, the company uses Private Cloud Compute infrastructure, which uses M2 Ultra-powered servers. It plans to switch to faster and more efficient M4-powered variants next year.

The majority of companies use Nvidia’s GPU for AI training. Apple is one notable exception, using its own Apple silicon chips or other non-x86 SoCs to train its AI models.