Apple will use custom AI chips from Amazon Web Services to pre-train its Apple Intelligence models, the company revealed at the AWS Reinvent Conference in Las Vegas.
Benoit DupinApple’s senior director of machine learning and AI, highlighted the company’s decade-long relationship with AWS, detailing how Amazon’s Inferentia and Graviton chips have already improved the efficiency of search services by 40%. The company is currently evaluating Amazon’s latest releases Trainium2 chippotentially offering up to a 50% improvement in model pre-training efficiency.
This unexpected collaboration marks a rare public endorsement by Apple of a technology vendor. CEO of AWS Matt Garman revealed that Apple had proactively reached out to Amazon to seek infrastructure support for its generative AI capabilities.
While the partnership may raise eyebrows among privacy-conscious consumers, Apple has emphasized that use of the chip is limited to training models, a behind-the-scenes process that does not compromise user data privacy. The company will continue to use its own Private Cloud Compute infrastructure powered by Apple silicon for the actual processing of AI features.
The move follows a similar approach Apple took in July, when a research paper revealed the company used hardware designed by Google to build its foundational AI model.