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Apple plans to more than triple its home-built critical power capacity by 2023 and beyond, according to a report from analyst firm Structure research.
The report (via DailyHostNews) covers all the important ones hyperscalers and has identified Apple as the one that will grow the most in the coming years. Power – in data center lingo – is an important measure of growth as it indicates how much energy is available to power not only servers but other supporting functions such as lighting, power station, UPSair conditioning etc.
Apple is expected to add more than 1.4 GW of capacity to reach 2 GW, a 233% increase that is proportionally the highest of the competition. While Google is still the largest player (with the potential to nearly double its capacity to 3 GW), Apple is focusing entirely on its own active devices; it surpassed two billion in February 2023, confirming it has more than 900 million iOS users are subscribed to one or more apps.
In other words, unlike Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, Apple is not a public hyperscaler and, unlike Facebook, is not required to maintain a service used by billions of users on a wide variety of platforms every day.
Additional data center power capacity means that Apple could look for services that require much more energy to run, which could be virtual/augmented reality (and there are many rumors surrounding one Apple VR headset) or larger push-in services – requiring no new hardware. Yes, you could argue that Apple could use the extra capacity to create a website builder service benefiting thousands small companies that rely on iCloud, but we doubt it.
Siri meets ChatGPT?
Hundreds of millions of users have used it Siri already, and it remains Apple’s biggest competitor for the current star attraction, ChatGPT. However, Siri – who will be 12 in 2023 – has remained largely in the shadows and limited to just one channel – voice. What if Siri’s involvement in users’ lives went beyond the mundane”hey Siri, what’s the news today?” in much deeper conversations, both in audio, text and image?
There are three reasons why Apple would want to do that; first, it’s yet another way to bolster the appeal of the company’s ecosystem, and another compelling point at its annual WWDC showcase.
Second, Apple could end its lucrative search deal with Google by launching its own ChatGPT-like search engine with Siri at its core. The New York times reported in 2020 that the deal was worth up to $12 billion a year, a figure likely to rise as the number of active users continues to grow as well. That’s a Google tax that — if repealed — could potentially eliminate a fifth of Google’s net income and tumble its stock.
The third reason is that such a move would allow Apple to get its own company AWS moment by creating what would be the basis for future services; and it could do that using its own hardware: the M family and its neural engine.
We know that the M1 Ultrathe fastest from Apple CPU had a performance of 22 TOPS (Trillions Operations Per Second) so far and now the expectation – based on what we know about the M2 – is that the M2 Ultra – expected to launch in March 2023 – will break the 30 TOPS barrier.
With access to advanced lithography lines and vertical control over the entire hardware stack, Apple could rival Amazon, whose Gravity Weapon-based AWS processors threaten the Xeon And Epyc family lines. Would a hypothetical S1 (S for server) processor power the next generation of Apple services?