Apple had the same choices as any other technology company with money to burn when it came to training its artificial intelligence models. It could have used its own chips, conducted training via cloud infrastructure, or gone the popular route and just bought billions of dollars’ worth of Nvidia chips. Instead, it made a deal with the company that owns Google.
Apple has been accused of being late to the artificial intelligence party. While its peers were busy pivoting to generative AI and pouring billions of dollars into training chips and cloud services, Apple’s public-facing image focused on iPhone sales and “spatial computing.”
This led analysts and pundits to worry over whether the house that Steve Jobs built was falling behind its closest competitors. Then, in June of 2024, the market itself seemed to confirm those fears when Nvidia passed up Google, Apple, and Microsoft to become the most valuable company in the world.
At its peak, around June 19, Nvidia’s market cap reached approximately $3.45 trillion. At that point it became not just the 2024 market leader, but the most valuable company ever. Even more impressive was the fact that its value grew by 147% year-over-year and by 2,617% over the past five years.
Economics and finance analysts have pointed to myriad factors potentially driving the growth, but Nvidia’s largest sources of revenue since at least 2017 have been its GPU chips.
It was estimated in late 2023 that the company’s products accounted for about 70% of all AI chip sales.
[Source: Cointelegraph]
