Apple weighs its first server since the Xserve, and as always, Nvidia may hold the key

Reports claim Apple is weighing an as-yet-unapproved enterprise AI server with two or four M8 Ultra chips, targeting 2029 Apple is considering using Nvidia's NVLink Fusion to link the chips, with Thunderbolt-based Mac clustering falling short of data center bandwidth requirements The move comes as demand continues to be a key driver for Apple's higher-end Macs, with AI firms buying Mac minis and Mac Studios in bulk, even as Apple has turned enterprise buyers away Apple has been working on plans for an enterprise AI server built on its own silicon with an interesting twist: it is seeking Nvidia's help on the networking front to make it work.

A report by The Information claims Apple is considering two configurations: one with two of its future M8 Ultra chips and a larger one with four, aimed at businesses that want to run AI inference on their own hardware rather than in a public cloud.

The timeline, however, is long and loose, with a potential launch in 2029, though the same report cautions that the project could be canceled before then, with neither the server nor any Nvidia arrangement finalized at the time of writing.

A market that Apple previously walked away from If it ships, the machine would be Apple's first purpose-built server since the Xserve, which Apple announced it would discontinue in November 2010 and stopped selling at the end of January 2011.

Steve Jobs's explanation, in an email to a reader of French site MacGeneration, reported by MacRumors at the time, was blunt: "Hardly anyone was buying them." Gartner's data backed up that claim with an estimated 10,000 units being sold per quarter, a relatively low number for the tech giant whose numbers normally ran in the hundreds of thousands or millions for most of its other products.

Apple's suggested replacements to users were server configurations of the Mac mini and Mac Pro, desktops running server software rather than rack hardware.

If the 2029 launch materializes, it would mean Apple's reversal would see it enter the server market 18 years after the Xserve stopped being sold.

This time, however, feels different: The Information has reported that OpenAI bought tens of thousands of Mac minis and Mac Studios to train AI agents through reinforcement learning, and that Anthropic has rented Mac minis through Amazon Web Services, as per Ars Technica .

Getting caught off guard by AI-centric demand Apple reportedly was caught off guard by the AI-driven rush for its hardware, with no enterprise AI strategy, no business engineering team in place, and no specific developer relations staff to manage those orders.

As a result, it also turned away businesses asking to buy access to its Private Cloud Compute infrastructure.