Apple Reportedly Considers AI Server for a 2029 Return to the Server Market

Apple is reportedly considering an enterprise AI server with two or four future M8 Ultra chips. It would target organizations running trained AI models on their own hardware and could launch no earlier than 2029. If released, it would be Apple’s first purpose-built server since the company retired Xserve in 2011.

This is a reported plan, not a product announcement. The server has not been approved, its potential Nvidia arrangement is unfinished, and Apple could cancel the project or pursue it without Nvidia technology.

The connection is the hard part

The reported server is intended for inference, meaning it would run already-trained models. Apple is considering Nvidia’s NVLink Fusion to connect the chips, because Thunderbolt-based Mac clustering may not offer enough bandwidth for a data-center system.

The issue is not just fitting more chips into one box. They also need to exchange data quickly. TechRadar says Apple’s Thunderbolt 5 can transfer up to 10GB per second in both directions. Nvidia says its sixth-generation NVLink, available through NVLink Fusion, can connect up to 72 accelerators at 3.6TB per second each. These are product specifications, not a test of an Apple server that does not yet exist.

Demand for Macs set the context

The Information reported that OpenAI bought tens of thousands of Mac minis and Mac Studios for reinforcement-learning work on AI agents. It also said Anthropic rented Mac minis through Amazon Web Services. That demand helps explain the possible server, but does not show that Apple will release it.

A possible return after Xserve

After retiring Xserve, Apple pointed customers toward server configurations of the Mac mini and Mac Pro rather than dedicated rack hardware. The newer effort reportedly began about a year before the September reports and had support from John Ternus while he led Apple’s hardware engineering organization.