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Apple says it will add 20k jobs, spend $500B, produce AI servers in US
- helsinkiandrew 2y agohttps://archive.ph/EfwDl https://archive.ph/EfwDl
- showmexyz 2y agoSomething buried in this, Apple are starting their own server manufacturing.
- reaperducer 2y agoAnd in the United States, too. (Houston)
- jermaustin1 2y agoI would assume it is for their own use, not for people wanting the XServe to come back with M4 Ultra (i.e. me...).
- throwaway48476 2y agoSuch a shame. I'd be interested in a personal server.
- olyjohn 2y agoWhy would Apple want you to have one though?
- btucker 2y agoAgreed, but I wonder--given investors demands for continued growth--if they're considering going up against NVIDIA.
- smallmancontrov 2y agoNah, surely 80% margins for matrix multiplication on the latest TSMC node will last forever.
- sampton 2y agoNvidia has proven the space is incredibly lucrative and Apple is best equipped for high end chip designs. Remember 10 years ago it was unthinkable for an ARM chip to compete with x86.
- nobankai 2y agoFirst Apple has to prove they have competitive designs. Apple Silicon GPUs simply do not compete with the efficiency of Nvidia's GPU compute architecture: https://browser.geekbench.com/opencl-benchmarks https://browser.geekbench.com/opencl-benchmarks Apple's obsessive focus with raster efficiency really shot their GPU designs in the foot. It will be interesting to see if they adopt Nvidia-style designs or spend more time trying to force NPU hardware to work.
- jermaustin1 2y agoI think performance per watt is way in Apple's favor, but raw performance is not. That said, an M4 Ultra (extrapolating from Max and Pro) would likely compete with my 3090, and with 192GB of memory (for 10x the amount it should cost) will out perform my 3x3090 AI server. And honestly, cost less than my 3 3090s + rest of the computer + electricity. It won't outperform a bunch of A/H 100s (or even a single one, or any other cards in the enterprise realm) though, but it will cost an order of magnitude less than a single card.
- jdsully 2y agoCareful when comparing performance and efficiency. As a rough factor power increases quadratically as you increase clocks on a design, so you can quite easily make a high performance design low power by under-clocking it. The same is not true for the reverse.
- m463 2y agoI think you are comparing apples and oranges. inference is not the same as training.
- 2y ago
- barkerja 2y agoThat's not necessarily news, unless I am missing something. Craig made an indirect mention of this during last year's WWDC regarding the private cloud compute. https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/ https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/
- layer8 2y agoThat’s not completely news: https://www.macrumors.com/2024/05/06/apple-building-m2-ultra-and-m4-servers/ https://www.macrumors.com/2024/05/06/apple-building-m2-ultra...
- dang 2y ago(This comment was originally posted to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43158187 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43158187, so "this" was a different article. We merged that thread hither.)
- 7thpower 2y agoDoing gods work, thank you.
- cadamsdotcom 2y agoGoing to be watching closely - but cynically, a promise of investment (for avoidance of tariffs) only needs to last one news cycle until tariffs are no longer top of mind. Then it can be walked back without tariffs being imposed. Maybe instead of saying the t-word tariff, US gov can charge Apple a special fee on each iPhone. They can call it something catchy, like say, a Core Technology Fee.
- matwood 2y agoSounds like a throwback lol https://edition.cnn.com/2019/09/23/tech/apple-mac-pro-united-states/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2019/09/23/tech/apple-mac-pro-united...
- le-mark 2y agoThis should be the top comment. Apple are doing business the way business is done, just like last time. Results don’t matter, it’s economic policy via press release. Form over substance.
- tesch1 2y agoResults matter, it's not hard to imagine that Apple considers the real risk of its promise and market position of being the privacy option being undermined by their supply chain risks, and leverage being used against them by privacy unfriendly actors.
- jajko 2y agoResults don't matter as much as PR, this is time when this is unfortunately valid. Just look at US elections. Measurable results affect rational aspects of our minds, PR attempts to attacks directly emotions bypassing the former, ie to induce impulsive shopping. Also, what actual security? Apple is as vulnerable as cheap chinese phones against state actors using 0days. Apple devices are still being stolen for spare parts, Apple doesnt secure each component AFAIK and thieves know this (very recent case with friend of a friend, they even knew how to bypass that built in airtag tracking). I haven't seen anything but very well crafted PR statements on this topic. All money-accessing apps on absolutely any phone are a security risk. But folks love convenience above all.
- mrweasel 2y agoWhile I have no real opinion on this, I do have questions: * What type of jobs? * Does the US have the required people, in terms of numbers and skills? * Does this mean moving to US based fabs for the M-series chips? * Is this actually profitable, or is this just a political move?
- notahacker 2y agoAnd related to your last bullet point: will it actually happen or is floating this just a political move...
- xadhominemx 2y agoIt will actually happen because it’s nothing new. The 500b is almost all wages for existing US-based employees. They are looking for a carve out from the new China tariffs (same as last time). Note - they made a very similar announcement 4 years ago https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/04/apple-commits-430-billion-in-us-investments-over-five-years/ https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/04/apple-commits-430-bil...
- nottorp 2y agoAnd one more: * Will this raise prices for customers outside the US for no justifiable reason?
- Aeolun 2y agoThe required people can just be imported from China?
- wodenokoto 2y ago* What type of jobs? - "The 20,000 additional jobs, Apple said, will focus on research and development, silicon engineering and AI." * Does the US have the required people, in terms of numbers and skills? - "The company is opening up what it calls a manufacturing academy in Detroit, where it will help smaller companies with manufacturing. It already operates an academy for app developers in the city. It’s also doubling its manufacturing fund in the US to $10 billion." - Sounds like they are upskilling, and will count the employees of companies joining the academy as "jobs created" * Does this mean moving to US based fabs for the M-series chips? - "[M-Series] chips themselves, however, continue to be produced in Taiwan. * Is this actually profitable, or is this just a political move? - Define profitable. It is cheaper than paying tariffs.
- KeplerBoy 2y agoDo we think Apple will once again sell servers to customers? I guess they could sell servers to customers who want to run the latest Apple Intelligence models on-prem, even though that probably wouldn't make much of a difference, since you probably still have to trust Apple.
- newsclues 2y ago1u boxes or Mac Mini "servers"?
- simondotau 2y agoIt would make sense for Apple to fork their next highest-end Mac Studio motherboard, make relatively minor changes to it (e.g. add a higher bandwidth NIC and strip out unnecessary I/O) then wrap multiples of those into a rack mount chassis, with commodity-grade cooling and power supply solutions appropriate for the context. Combined with a properly headless fork of their OS stack (think Darwin, not OS X Server) they could spin up a highly competitive solution using entirely "B-team" resources.
- newsclues 2y agoLots of interesting things Apple could do with their resources. A modern version of the Xserve RAID for high speed flash storage could be very interesting. The Mac Mini could be used as small blades. or they could do something really wild, like take the Oxide rack scale approach and make something big for DCs. But they might also want to get a piece of the prosumer homelab market that Ubiquiti is in?
- rickdeckard 2y ago...then it would be piped through their design-council, run through 5 more iterations to get a unique unibody case for it, accompanied by an optional proprietary Apple rack and a price-tag triple of the competition. That's along the lines of how it usually rolls whenever Apple tries to make something purely utilitarian, it's the most considerate and "fresh" look at a product, but ultimately designed to be used and then disposed when finished. A purely utilitarian IT-appliance without a individual end-user doesn't seem to be possible in their product pipeline, you usually end up with something "Prosumer": Impressive on its own, yet of degraded maintainability and scalability. It's like asking Bugatti to design a public transport bus. It would surely be an impressive bus, but not one you would want to maintain over years at a scale of hundreds.
- spiderfarmer 2y agoWatch them lay off 5k highly paid employees in order to create 20k low paid jobs.
- pixxel 2y ago[dead]
- whamlastxmas 2y agoI’d be happy in the 20k bucket honestly, the job market is terrible
- jonplackett 2y agoMaybe $500 billion will finally be enough to make Siri useful for more than just setting an alarm.
- joshstrange 2y agoWhoa, whoa, whoa, on occasion, if the planets align just right, I can also get Siri to set a reminder (and at least half the time Siri gets it 80% right). LLM Siri cannot come fast enough.
- nottorp 2y agoLLMs are there for generating/hallucinating text, not for understanding text. For natural language processing you need a different kind of neural network don't you?
- drodgers 2y agoWhat are you talking about? We've invented the Universal Translator already.
- joshstrange 2y agoI’m confident that LLM’s will not have hallucination problems in the type of requests that I send to Siri. I don’t ask Siri for facts (just like I don’t ask LLM’s for facts). As long as it can correctly, understand what and when I ask to be reminded about something, that would be a huge improvement for me. That and being able to map “Bedroom Fan”/“Bedroom Fan Light” to “Bedroom Fan Lights” without having to specify aliases (and even then it hearing me wrong). I’ve see Home Assistant working with LLMs and it can understand groupings that I never explicitly defined which is very nice. I can say “Turn off all overhead lights” and it will find all my overhead lights and turn them off. Siri/Alexa can’t handle those tasks currently.
- zzbzq 2y agoIt's the other way around. The model is impeccable at "understanding text." It's a gigantic mathematical spreadsheet that quantifies meaning. The model probably "understands" better than any human ever could. Running that backwards into producing new text is where it gets hand-wavy & it becomes unclear if the generative algorithms are really progressing on the same track that humans are on, or just some parallel track that diverges or even terminates early.
- konschubert 2y agoAfter an oligarchy, looks like the us is also getting a planned economy now.
- lazide 2y ago‘Planned’. A command economy anyway.
- konschubert 2y ago?
- lazide 2y agoA planned economy has a plan. I doubt that will exist. A command economy has different elements of the economy ordered around to do what leadership wants. That seems a lot more likely.
- pupperino 2y agoIs this a joke that I'm not getting? "Planned economy" and "command economy" are synonyms.
- mapt 2y agoWe used to call this an "Industrial policy" or an "Economic development policy". Back in the golden era when a strong labor movement coexisted with a Red Scare. 78 years after Taft-Hartley and 44 years since PATCO, not so much. We have maybe fifty or a hundred million people rotting away in areas where jobs are scarce and housing is plentiful, because we used government policy to shut them out of areas where jobs are plentiful and housing is scarce. We systematically exported jobs from places that aren't big cities because they can be performed overseas and our aristocracy can still profit from them by owning those people overseas. I don't know if returning to a little more deliberate of an economy is even a partial salve for the place we've found ourselves, but I don't think this laissez faire thing is sustainable for a whole lot longer. We are overleveraged, and arrogantly delusional about our sway at the moment; "Ownership" is not some valuable skill. The fall of an anchor currency and global conversion to an alternate financial network would be a spectacular thing, an astroid striking terrain, which might leave craters on entire other continents from secondary ejecta. World wars have been fought over less.
- comrade1234 2y agoOh god. Hopefully they’re lighter than the old xserves. We had one still running up until a few years ago when we finally removed it. You could break a toe if it dropped while pulling it out of the rack. People are still selling them on eBay.
- nottorp 2y agoHey quality stuff is heavy! The desktop case for my 286, I could stand on it and it would not bend!
- ChrisMarshallNY 2y agoI suspect that was the RAID drive bay (ridiculous item). That was a 3-4U monster. The Xserve, itself, was a 1U unit that was pretty much the same (or lighter than) any other 1U server (we also had HP and Dell servers that were heavy). The weight distribution could be weird. That stupid drive bay was a proprietary nightmare. The disks cost a fortune. However, from what I can see, this will be for "internal-use" servers. I don't think they will be selling iron; just services run on the iron.
- michelb 2y agoI'm curious what they will look like, given that these are not for anyone else to buy. Maybe Apple made a different form factor/configuration that suits their datacenters better?
- chippiewill 2y agoI don't think it's AI servers for Apple to sell. I think it's just regular x86 Linux servers to power Apple's AI cloud services. It's a commitment to internal investment rather than a product.
- hhh 2y agoThey have hiring positions for running a Darwin-based server OS, and their private cloud compute is on Apple Silicon. I doubt it's going to be swaths of x86.
- tux3 2y agoDoes this mean competing with Asahi to run a Linux kernel, or will this be an attempt to run AI workloads on XNU? Consider the cost of GPUs, losing what could be double digit percents on overhead might not make this very competitive. The macOS microkernel can still beat NT in some situations (like not having filters slowing filesystem down to a crawl), but it lags significantly behind the investment in Linux performance over the years by every other major company.
- chippiewill 2y agoI don't think it's AI servers for Apple silicon. I think it's just regular x86 Linux servers to power Apple's AI cloud services. It's a commitment to internal investment rather than a product.
- cube2222 2y agoFWIW, Apple’s AI “private cloud compute” is Apple Silicon-based, and it’s a core part of some of the security guarantees offered. See [0]. [0]: https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/ https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/
- bayindirh 2y agoI'll honestly love to see an Apple Silicon based XServe and comeback of "macOS $VERSION Server" add-on, and maybe an XSAN box. Doing a Mac Mini sized version for SOHO would be great, too. One can dream, I guess...
- littlecranky67 2y agoApple doesn't like B2B and Steve Jobs was very vocal on this (there are various videos where he explains why). Ever since they can afford to, they reduced their B2B to the bare minimum needed. So don't expect anything server-like from Apple.
- 2y ago
- matrix2596 2y agowhat can people outside US and china do?
- michelb 2y agoDepending on where you live, be thankful for a functioning democracy?
- ozmodiar 2y agoIMO we've really got to start pressuring our own governments to take control of their networks, as well as the companies the population is going through (not just Facebook, but even international contractors for services). Letting a foreign government have this much control over the data of your populace and the ability to feed whatever algorithmic message they like is a path bound for disaster in the long run. The powers of the world are way too consolidated as is, and a company can turn into a state actor at the drop of a hat. I don't think we can maintain kayfabe about the country/corporate divide. I also think this can be done without impacting freedom of speech for your population, as long as you don't consider corporations people. Most countries don't have the resources to do much, but even then they can try their hardest not to be beholden to any single foreign country coughChina, Americacough.
- paxys 2y agoAnyone keeping count of how many trillions in hypothetical investments and millions of jobs large American corporations have promised in the next 3-5 years?
- treaba1098 2y ago[flagged]
- 01100011 2y agoDon't forget the Saudis, who promised similar large investments during Trump's last term yet never followed through.
- jasdi 2y ago:) its like the dot com boom. How many around here remember those days?
- treaba1098 2y agoReverse technology transfer from countries like China is kind of fair. But EU companies should be very wary of Trump tariff blackmail that forces them to build production lines in the US.
- TMWNN 2y ago>But EU companies should be very wary of Trump tariff blackmail that forces them to build production lines in the US. That's the whole point of tariffs, to encourage domestic production. Put another way, what is the difference between what you wrote and >But US companies should be very wary of EU tariff blackmail that forces them to build production lines in the EU. ? Whether a particular tariff is economically viable is a reasonable debate. Calling Trump's tariffs "blackmail" without assigning that epithet to all tariffs from whatever source is not.
- briandear 2y agoSo the EU has no tariffs?
- kaveh_h 2y agoNot a lot of them, but Trump accuse EU of tariffs because it has VAT. That’s not the same thing because VAT apply to domestic companies as well so there’s no real unfair advantage. You could make the claim that it’s still worse for foreign goods as VAT can be offset with VAT from supplier purchases, but that only works if you produce goods in the same country as you sell them. But US companies have even larger advantage already as they don’t have any VAT, so in the end the playing field is kind of level. This doesn’t stop Trump from pressuring and squeezing and making false claims to justify his standing point. Expect an unstable trade environment due to tariffs and retaliation. This will hurt small businesses that have even more complex environment to operate in.
- dboreham 2y ago> they don’t have any VAT VAT is what Americans call "sales tax" and US companies do pay and charge that.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- rs186 2y agoReminder: https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/30/20747765/apple-mac-pro-2019-united-states-production-assembly https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/30/20747765/apple-mac-pro-20...
- jmyeet 2y agoThere's a lot of understandable skepticism about this announcement because there are so many PR announcements. I want to temper that with an alternative perspective. I actually think Apple is a potential dark horse when it comes to AI hardware. What we have now is essentially a three-layered monopoly: ASML, TSMC, NVidia. This has been incredibly lucrative for NVidia. But, as we know, Apple doesn't like to rely on third-party hardware. They've invested heavily in ARM going back to buying PA Semi [1]. Apple replaced Intel chips (which originally replaced Power chips) with the M series in recent years. Apple is in the process of replacing Qualcomm modems in iPhones, which is not only a technical feat but a legal one given Qualcomm's patent dominance over 4G/5G. Apple has the resolve for long-term initiatives that few other companies have. Apple Pay continues to chip away and get slowly better in a way that, if it were a Google product, would've been cancelled, rebranded, relaunched probably 3-4 times by now (Google Checkout, Google Wallet, Google Pay, Android Pay, etc). Apple clearly sees AI as a strategic issue. They have loads of cash on hand to finance basically anything they want. And they won't want to be beholden to NVidia. I expect Apple to have a significant impact here but it won't be tomorrow or even this year. It'll be over the next 5-10 years. [1]: https://www.wired.com/2008/04/four-reasons-ap/ https://www.wired.com/2008/04/four-reasons-ap/
- nobankai 2y agoApple's incentives have definitely aligned with replacing Nvidia entirely ever since they ceased diplomatic relations. But Nvidia also knows this, which is why they invest heavily in things Apple will never do. They write the official Linux drivers Apple wouldn't get caught dead supporting. They give users and integrators freedom to choose their OS, software and library stacks to better suit their application. They sell individual GPUs and unlocked edge compute hardware with no distribution terms or $99/year "developer license" bullshit. Nvidia is a hardware company in places where Apple tries shipping services instead. Then there's also the software issues. Nvidia has invested in GPU-based compute nonstop for the past 10+ years. Apple invested in Nvidia, then invested in OpenCL after abandoning Nvidia, then abandoned OpenCL for Metal compute which would eventually become the proprietary Accelerate framework. Nvidia's eggs are all organized in one, valuable basket. Apple's investments are spread out all over the place, with much of the time and money going into projects that don't even exist anymore. Apple has the TSMC advantage, but that's just about it. Their GPU designs aren't comparably efficient or compute-oriented to what Nvidia ships today. Additionally, Nvidia will continue investing in places that Apple principally refuses to support. Unless a serious tide change occurs at Apple, they aren't going to get a fair competition with Nvidia.
- rvz 2y agoAll for the purpose of the AI servers that will power Apple's own private AI models for training and inference running on Apple Silicon. Still in a AAPL long position since $170 and waiting for the re-introduction of Xserve with a new Apple Silicon-based OS. [0] Probably "aiOS" (Just guessing). [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40278371 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40278371
- nobankai 2y ago[flagged]
- oldpersonintx 2y ago[dead]
- alphabetting 2y agoGood to see but brings to mind the deal they cut with China in 2016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29482351 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29482351
- cgcrob 2y agoCynical take here, but I think realistic. There's a lot of noise I can see behind the scenes on investor confidence. Noise as in "everything is fucked" sort of level of noise. Thus I expect this is being said to try and stop the AAPL stock collapsing in the upcoming recession that the analysts are predicting more than a tangible expansion and recruitment goal. I also take issue with their being 20,000 people on the market who are still able to contribute something useful. They will be culled quickly and quietly down the line in the annual corporate lay offs. It is not the time to make grand gestures unless you're trying to gain political favour, at which point any respect I have at least is gone. Market opening today should be interesting...
- foxandmouse 2y agoCoincidentally, construction isn’t set to start until late November 2028—convenient timing. If this mess blows over, they can quietly backpedal and carry on like nothing happened.
- bell-cot 2y agoEvery major business leader is stuck saying "do what we have to" a lot. The difference between the great leaders and the crap leaders is all in the details.
- crowcroft 2y agoGood timing because Trump should be significantly weaker, and it'll be clear where Trumpism is headed in the culture, but also it will be more clear where AI will end up. Even if the move forward with investment, they will be a bit of a 'late' mover, but will have had a chance to see what is working and what isn't working for everyone else.
- gsibble 2y agoTrump might be weaker but if Vance were to win the 2028 election he'd just continue the same policies.
- crowcroft 2y agoMaybe, but that's a huge IF. It's assuming 1. JD Vance independent of Trump will have the same policies. 2. JD Vance will have enough popularity for a serious 2028 run. He might fall out favour with Trump as Trump tries to mount a bid for a third term, Trumpism might just generally lose popularity if policies lead to bad outcomes. 3. Dems don't figure their shit out. They should be able to take back some control in mid-terms, and then start to push their own policies, or at least credibly show that the most extreme policies from the exec branch don't have teeth anymore.
- amazingman 2y agoAnd you're assuming that the 2028 election (and 2026 for that matter) will be business as usual elections, against all evidence to the contrary staring us directly in the face.
- 1970-01-01 2y agoThis is an insane amount of cash to throw at any problem. They could have Apple rockets mining asteroids with $500,000,000,000. There is no way all this cash goes into AI. What will actually happen is they will take 1/10th this cash to an over-valued startup and acquire them.
- whamlastxmas 2y agoBetween land, hardware, having to build multiple power plants, the labor costs involved in all of this, and setting money aside to run all of those for however long, then yeah I can see where it gets up to that price. 20k engineers is easily 5 billion per year in salaries, probably more.
- 1970-01-01 2y agoThe maths are not adding up. Assume the human resources at $100,000 per head, and you get $2B/yr. Four years comes to just $8B for human resources. Assume land costs $10B. Assume construction costs $100B. 100+10+8 is $118B Where is the money actually going?
- whamlastxmas 2y agoApple is not hiring engineers at 100k total cost per person. It’s like three times that. Operational costs are going to be staggering. These are data centers that use as much power as entire cities.
- fundad 2y agoApple is just giving a PR win to the administration like they did last time their preferred party was in power.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ArtTimeInvestor 2y agoLooks like the US is moving fast to bring the whole supply chain for everything and anything into its own borders. I wonder where this will lead to.
- Tepix 2y agoWill they remain competitive with other big players producing in cheaper countries?
- ArtTimeInvestor 2y agoWho are those "other big players" when it comes to building a complete AI stack? Who can compete with Tesla and Waymo without having to buy hardware and software from the US? Who can compete with OpenAI, Google, Grok, Perplexity without US hardware and software?
- willvarfar 2y agoThe Chinese? It sounds flippant but the US hasn't got some unassailable moat around chip production or their application.
- ArtTimeInvestor 2y agoIt's not a small feat. China would have to: 1: Take over Taiwan to get TSML under their control 2: Find a way to make a deal with ASML for the needed lithography machines 3: Somehow aquire the knowhow that Nvidia has Taiwan would require a conflict with the US. ASML is a dutch company but seems to be somehow under US control. I have not yet figured out the exact setup there. And Nvidia is a US company.
- willvarfar 2y agoChina has steadily been developing its own processes and the laser tech needed for smaller sizes. It is very clear that both US and China are racing to onshore and establish sovereign control of chip production. Sucks to be Taiwanese right now. The "silicon shield" is evaporating.
- kittikitti 2y agoTexas is big tech's choice to skirt employee protections. I'm sure these are the type of jobs, similar to Foxconn per the article, that Americans are looking forward to.
- 42772827 2y agoWhile that’s certainly a key component, Texas is also home to the largest potential solar and wind capacity in the country. There’s also a ton of land to build on.
- hooverd 2y agoAt this rate, Texas is going to go the way of it's hat and ban "woke energy" like solar and wind. [0] [0] https://heatmap.news/plus/the-fight/spotlight/renewable-energy-ban-oklahoma https://heatmap.news/plus/the-fight/spotlight/renewable-ener...
- 42772827 2y agoUnlikely. Texas is the largest exporter of crude oil and natural gas, the largest in capacity for refining petroleum, and huge exporter of petrochemicals in the US. More solar and wind means more oil for refinement and export.
- rbanffy 2y agoAnd Austin was an island of sanity according to my friends who lived there.
- voidfunc 2y agoWhen Texas flips blue like California did way back it's going to be interesting
- gjsman-1000 2y agoNah, watch what happens when California goes red, if Dems repeat their 2024 performance trends.
- neolithic 2y ago"Four years ago, a few months after President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s inauguration, Apple announced an “acceleration” of its U.S. investments, pledging to spend $430 billion and add 20,000 jobs over five years. In January 2018, during Mr. Trump’s first term, the company said that its “direct contribution to the U.S. economy” would be $350 billion over five years and that it planned to create 20,000 jobs over that period. Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment." Is this just lip service? What happened to those previous investments?
- htrp 2y agothey are all counted as part of this 500bn?
- bombcar 2y agoI think the question is "have they done anything" or do they just keep promising to do something someday?
- ghaff 2y agoThis happens all the time with large investments in $X that make for impressive sounding press releases. If you (can) dig into the details, invariably a lot of the money is in previously committed/spent allocations in a whole bunch of different buckets (or, per bombcar's sibling comment, money that may never be spent at all).
- merillecuz56 2y ago[dead]
- ChrisArchitect 2y agoOfficial release: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/02/apple-will-spend-more-than-500-billion-usd-in-the-us-over-the-next-four-years/ https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/02/apple-will-spend-more... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43158187 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43158187)
- bryanlarsen 2y agoDid they basically just recycle this? https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/04/apple-commits-430-billion-in-us-investments-over-five-years/ https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/04/apple-commits-430-bil...
- Handy-Man 2y agoYup. "Apple’s most recent announcement on US investment was a 2021 promise to spend $430 billion over the following five years, including a 3,000-employee campus in North Carolina, though development on that project has since paused." https://www.theverge.com/news/618172/apple-500-billion-us-investment-tariffs-trump https://www.theverge.com/news/618172/apple-500-billion-us-in...
- dmix 2y agoSome new things in the article - a larger investment number in a previously announced Austin campus - new factory in Houston "which will create thousands of jobs" - "doubling its $5 billion US Advanced Manufacturing Fund to $10 billion" - "It will also open an Apple Manufacturing Academy in Detroit in which Apple engineers and other experts will offer consultations to local businesses on “implementing AI and smart manufacturing techniques,” along with free classes for workers."
- jtbayly 2y agoThe 2021 announcement works out to $86B per year. The 2025 announcement works out to $125B per year. In my mind that’s a pretty substantial increase.
- ceejayoz 2y agoAbout half of that is just inflation; $86B is $104B now.
- black_puppydog 2y agoIIUC, that $86B in 2021 plus inflation works out to ~$100B in 2025. So it's a 25% increase then?
- blindriver 2y agoSay what you want about Trump, this is the kind of deal that wouldn't have happened with any of the previous administrations, both Democrat or Republican. It's the kind of deal that keeps MAGA loyal to him, despite all the noise about DOGE.
- soperj 2y agohttps://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/04/apple-commits-430-billion-in-us-investments-over-five-years/ https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/04/apple-commits-430-bil... Never would have happened with any of the previous administrations...
- DannyBee 2y agoThey already did it once in the previous administration, so i guess that argument is out the window. Got any others?
- fma 2y agoWhat keeps MAGA loyal is only consuming news that do not bring up when previous administrations did such kind of deals.
- vineyardmike 2y ago> Four years ago, a few months after Mr. Biden’s inauguration, Apple announced an “acceleration” of its U.S. investments, pledging to spend $430 billion and add 20,000 jobs over five years. In January 2018, during Mr. Trump’s first term, the company said that its “direct contribution to the U.S. economy” would be $350 billion over five years and that it planned to create 20,000 jobs over that period Anyways, the land (obviously in Texas) is already purchased and has been sitting empty. The unbuilt factory keeps getting more expensive though.
- black_13 2y ago[dead]
- xyst 2y agoMark my words: it will end up like the Apple Car. Apple “Intelligence” has been a flop.
- nobankai 2y ago[flagged]
- jcgrillo 2y agolol. lmao.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- brailsafe 2y agoApple better hope none of their customers realize how comparatively mid of a product iphones are by the time those servers are ready.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Febra33 2y agoTime to move away from Apple before they train their AI Models on the rest of my data that they left untouched
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- kevin_thibedeau 2y agoIf only they could spare a few dozen devs to update the command line tools to the 21st century.
- trey-jones 2y agoMany people here are commenting that brew is a good way to get modern tools. I must say, I prefer Docker by several country miles.
- rbanffy 2y agoIt’s like having the tools in a different computer. You can mount your local filesystem onto the container, but if feels like WSL - there’s always an “impedance mismatch” between the two sides. I prefer to use the tools running locally on the same OS I’m working with. For that, MacPorts is great.
- phendrenad2 2y agoYou mean how the Unix standard tools on Mac are way behind Linux?
- zifpanachr23 2y agoSo are the BSD tools by some definition of "behind". Another way to look at this is to say that GNU tools as typically seen in modern Linux are bloated (I know, Linux and "bloat" are kind of a meme, but it is generically true for the most part when it comes to the command line utilities feature creep over the years, so it's a useful and descriptive word). I have to work with old machines and legacy operating systems quite a bit in my day to day and I always am going to prefer something lighter and with less ways to shoot myself in the foot w.r.t. POSIX compliance. MacOS is Unix certified so I appreciate them being somewhat reserved in the features they add on top of POSIX. Modern GNU userland utils are nice and fun but if you are looking for compatibility it's best not to use them. Consequently, the MacOS situation doesn't bother me especially given you can install more up to date tools if you want. I think keeping the defaults older and more compatible is a good thing.
- beefnugs 2y agoSounds like ireland or wherever their tax haven is might make some real savings from this
- machinekob 2y agoThanks to ireland all big US corporations saved hundreds of billions of dollars past few years so now they can get back to US with this massive cash for anything they want (ofc. nothing will get back to EU as long as they ignore tax heavens)
- JackYoustra 2y agoIreland has harmonized tax rates with the global corporate minimum tax
- bloomingkales 2y agoSome part of me thinks they are billing an overbudget here to report that they actually didn't need to spend that much so that they can beat lower guidance (same play for MS, Google, Meta). We've heard that actually training these models doesn't cost even a billion dollars.
- iteratethis 2y agoQuite a lot of cash to generate AI stickers in messenger.
- hu3 2y agothis is it. siri will finally be reliable
- pchristensen 2y agoApparently right inline with their plans: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/02/24/apple-500-billion-american-manufacturing-plan https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/02/24/apple-500-billi...
- whalesalad 2y agoApple has been sitting on a war chest the size of Jupiter for a long time. Glad to see them putting it to good use.
- bdangubic 2y agoexpect of course they won’t… few months into every new administration (see 2017, 2021…) they’ll make a splash announcement like this… and then wait for the next administration to make it again
- whatever1 2y agoWill it be collocated with the promised Foxconn plant?
- quantum_state 2y agoThat is a con to con the con …
- quantum_state 2y agoIt’s a con to con the con …
- rcleveng 2y agoI don't get why folks keep saying x86 linux servers here for AI, if anything it'd be M series arm based servers, either running linux or macos. Realistically I'd imagine a set of scaled up mac mini arm servers for running inference or fine tuning on them as more likely being the "ai servers" than x86 based anything. Power is the key thing that they'll be optimizing for, and that's where ARM shines.
- m463 2y agoDon't they need gpus (for training)? Apple already did a footshoot wrt gpus in the apple ecosystem. unless they have some sort of apple-internal ai chips ready to train models.
- kridsdale3 2y agoApple's Private Cloud Compute is on racks of M4 chips which have NPUs and GPUs on-die and unified memory access to however much RAM they want to put on them. All of a sudden they're competitive with NVIDIA, but they don't let anyone else use that platform.
- nobankai 2y ago> All of a sudden they're competitive with NVIDIA Apple has no interconnect technology comparable to what Nvidia ships to datacenters. The larger Nvidia clusters measure their addressable memory in terabytes, the value of Unified Memory at that scale is practically negligible (if not wasted bandwidth). You're making some pretty handwavy generalizations here without a solid grasp on why Nvidia dominates GPGPU compute.
- kridsdale3 2y agoTrue, all I have to go on is what Apple presented about their proprietary system.
- nobankai 2y agoARM is not a GPU architecture, nor is Apple Silicon the most power efficient GPU/CPU available to datacenters. The factor Apple is optimizing for is their own profit - they're terrified by the notion that another company might dictate their software margins for them.
- firesteelrain 2y agoThe sentiment in this thread. Surely Apple has a fiduciary duty and so no reason for FUD.
- abalone 2y agoSome useful context: this is almost certainly being driven by Apple’s Private Cloud Compute architecture and not tariffs, as an investment of this magnitude is not planned overnight. Why is PCC driving Apple to spend billions to build servers in the states? Because it is insane from a security standpoint (insanely awesome). PCC is an order of magnitude more secure server platform than has ever been deployed for consumer use at planet scale. Secure and private enough to literally send your data and have it processed server side instead of on device without having to trust the host (Apple).[1] Until now the only way to do that was on device. If you sent your data for cloud processing, outside of something exotic like homomorphic encryption[2], you’d still have to trust that the host did a good job protecting your data, using it responsibly, and wasn’t compromised. Not the case with PCC. To accomplish this Apple uses its own custom chips with Secure Enclaves that provide a trust foundation for the whole system, ultimately cryptographically guaranteeing that the binaries processing your data have been publicly audited by independent security auditors. This is the so called hardware root of trust. It is essential then that the hardware deployed in data centers has not been physically tampered with. Without that the whole thing falls apart. So Apple has a whole section in their security white paper detailing an audited process for deploying data center hardware and ensuring supply chain integrity.[3] You can imagine how that is the weak point in the system made more robust by managing it in the US. Tighter supply chain control. [1] https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/ https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/ [2] Fun fact, Apple also just deployed a homomorphic encryption powered search engine! It’s also insane! [3] https://security.apple.com/documentation/private-cloud-compute/hardwareintegrity https://security.apple.com/documentation/private-cloud-compu...
- ipaddr 2y agoTrusting Secure Enclaves custom chips over processing locally is going to be a hard to impossible sell for those who truly care about privacy. Thankfully for Apple that's a very low number in a world where people demand tiktok remain legal when shown how their data is being used by foreign actors. People only care about privacy when it's local (don't want mother to find out, neighbours to talk, friend to think a certain way about you or classmate stalking) and that's why ai fakes are much more concern then a company knowing everything you do. But this product is great for fortune 500 businesses.
- very_good_man 2y agoAre they going to abandon H-1B and focus on hiring Americans for this project?
- llm_nerd 2y agoA strong majority of Apple's revenue comes from outside the US. If Apple is tied to US protectionism, it is precisely the sort of org that suffers. Now to be real, Apple has been announcing these multiple hundred billion dollar investments every four years like clockwork. They did it early in Trump's first term, they did it again early in Biden's term, now they're doing it again. But for all of the "Yeah, this is what tariffs are for! Hoo ya!" rhetoric, note that companies like Apple have far, far more to lose than what America "gains" by acts like this.
- bdangubic 2y agostrong minority you mean :) https://www.statista.com/statistics/382175/quarterly-revenue-of-apple-by-geograhical-region/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/382175/quarterly-revenue...
- llm_nerd 2y agoNo, I don't. The Americas in totality account for 42.3% of Apple's revenue. But of course "The Americas", despite the confusion of many Americans, is not only the USA, so while that is already a minority, South America is 14% of that 42.3%, then subtract Mexico and Canada...
- bdangubic 2y agoThe high revenue generated from the Americas is largely due to Apple’s strong performance in their home market, the United States. Apple has the largest market share among smartphone vendors in the U.S. by a large margin. Although international sales have a growing share of Apple’s total revenue, the U.S. still counts for around 42 percent of Apple’s net sales.
- llm_nerd 2y agoActually look at the data. That is a bullshit, erroneous summary by some lazy clown. The Americas in totality account for 42.3% of Apple sales. I mean...this is all so silly regardless. Even if the US accounted for 100% of sales in the Americas (protip - it doesn't remotely), that would STILL mean the majority is outside of the US. But in reality in US is only a fraction of Americas sales, and it's a strong majority sold elsewhere.
- believeanything 2y agoSure Jan