Apple is ready to cut ties with Nvidia

Siri icon in a data center

Apple is accelerating research and development of its own AI chip to reduce its reliance on third-party developers, possibly ending its ill-fated decades-long relationship with Nvidia.

In November 2020, Apple announced the M1 chip, its first foray into in-house designed processors for its Mac line. This decision effectively severed ties between Apple and Intel, the latter being responsible for previous processors in Apple computers.

It now appears that Apple is preparing to reduce its dependence on another third-party developer: Nvidia. Currently, Apple is working with Nvidia to drive many of the features behind Apple Intelligence.

Nvidia currently controls between 70% and 95% of the AI ​​chip market share, Technology review underlines. Its market position has propelled Nvidia to the top of the most valuable companies. It even eclipsed Apple’s top spot, albeit for a brief period, as noted CNBC.

Interestingly enough, Apple doesn’t buy Nvidia chips; rather, it rents access from cloud services managed by Amazon and Microsoft. But Apple is likely preparing to sever ties even further by allegedly partnering with Broadcom to design its own AI server chip.

A long and unhappy relationship

Apple’s relationship with Nvidia took off in the early 2000s when the company began using Nvidia chips in its Macs to improve graphics performance. But even then, relations between the companies were strained.

Reportedly, in a meeting with a senior Nvidia executive, then-CEO Steve Jobs said that Nvidia products contained technology copied from Pixar sources. The information. At the time, Jobs owned a majority stake in the animation studio. The executive pushed back on the idea, but Jobs simply ignored him for the rest of the meeting.

For its part, Nvidia doesn’t seem to like working with Apple either. He sees Apple as too demanding, especially for a company that consistently fails to make it into Nvidia’s top 10 customers.

According to former employees, Apple considered Nvidia an extremely difficult company to manage. Nvidia’s original chips were far from energy efficient and produced a lot of heat, both undesirable qualities for laptops. When Apple contacted Nvidia about the possibility of designing custom chips for MacBooks, Nvidia balked at the idea.

Tensions escalated in 2008 when a faulty graphics chip designed by Nvidia showed up in 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, ultimately playing a role in the development of Apple Silicon.

In the 2010s, Nvidia began to suspect that Apple, Samsung and Qualcomm were using its patented techniques to render graphics on their smartphones. Nvidia would continue to charge licensing fees to alleged infringers.

In 2019, Apple stopped cooperating with Nvidia on drivers for macOS Mojave. Not only did this break most future support, but the lack of drivers also prevented more modern cards from working on PCI-E Macs or eGPU-equipped Macs.

It wasn’t as if either company was particularly reluctant to work with the other – at least on a development level. Apple developers said so AppleInsider This support for Nvidia’s higher-tier cards would have been welcome, and would have even gone so far as to praise Nvidia’s engineers.

Apparently, the change was due to the fact that a high-ranking official at the company did not want Nvidia’s support. At this point, many recognized the tensions between the companies, but no one was sure who was responsible for supporting drivers.

Apple’s reluctance to end the feud

Currently, Nvidia executives argue that the fight is essentially one-sided. Nvidia said The information that the company remains open to collaborating with Apple.

As it stands, Apple appears to be aiming to launch its own AI processor, named 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 iPhone 17 Pro processors.