They get a gigantic boost in internal datacenter performance if they can jam a bunch of Apple Silicon chips into a rack mounted server and boot Linux on it. If

They get a gigantic boost in internal datacenter performance if they can jam a bunch of Apple Silicon chips into a rack mounted server and boot Linux on it. If they can get a similar boost in performance at lower power efficiency in the chip that is going in the Mac Pro, taking that chip and putting it on a board with Ethernet and Power wouldn't be a ton of engineering cost and then they could massively reduce the power consumption and cooling costs of the datacenters. And then they could resell the box they designed as a server, either with Linux support out of the box (unlikely, but since in this mystical scenario they'd have to write kernel patches for Linux to get it to boot...) or with a build of macOS that could be set up headlessly, in order to recoup the development costs. Apple shops that want machines to run Compressor or Xcode's build server would eat that up.