Amazon CEO, Andy Jassy speaking with CNBC’s Jim Cramer on Mad Money in Seattle, WA. on Dec. 6th, 2023.
CNBC
Apple is currently using Amazon Web Services’ custom artificial intelligence chips for services like search and will evaluate if the company’s latest AI chip can be used to pretrain its models like Apple Intelligence.
Apple revealed its usage of Amazon’s proprietary chips at the annual AWS Reinvent conference on Tuesday. Benoit Dupin, Apple’s senior director of machine learning and AI, took the stage to discuss how Apple uses the cloud service. It’s a rare example of the company officially allowing a supplier to tout them as a customer.
“We have a strong relationship, and the infrastructure is both reliable and able to serve our customers worldwide,” Apple’s Dupin said.
Apple’s appearance at Amazon’s conference and its embrace of the company’s chips is a strong endorsement of the cloud service as it vies with Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud for AI spending. Apple uses those cloud services, too.
Benoit said Apple had used AWS for more than a decade for services including Siri, Apple Maps and Apple Music. Apple has used Amazon’s Inferentia and Graviton chips to serve search services, for example, and Benoit said Amazon’s chips had led to a 40% efficiency gain.
But Benoit also suggested that Apple would use Amazon’s Trainium2 chip to pretrain its proprietary models. It’s a sign that Amazon’s chips aren’t just a cost-effective way to inference AI models compared with x86 central processors made by Intel and AMD, but can also be used to develop new AI. Amazon announced on Tuesday that its Trainium2 chip was generally available to rent.
“In early stages of evaluating Trainium2 we expect early numbers up to 50% improvement in efficiency with pretraining,” Dupin said.
AWS CEO Matt Garman said in an interview with CNBC on Tuesday that Apple had been an early adopter and beta-tester for the company’s Trainium chips.
Apple “came to us, and said to us, ‘how can you help us with our Generative AI capabilities, we need infrastructure in order to go build,’ and they had this vision for building Apple Intelligence,” AWS CEO Matt Carman told CNBC’s Kate Rooney.
Earlier this year, Apple said in a research paper that it had used Google Cloud’s TPU chips to train its iPhone AI service, which it calls Apple Intelligence.
The majority of AI training is done on pricey Nvidia graphics processors. Cloud providers and startups are racing to develop alternatives to lower costs and are exploring different approaches that could lead to more efficient processing. Apple’s usage of custom chips could signal to other companies that non-Nvidia training approaches can work.
AWS is expected to announce new details on Tuesday about offering Nvidia Blackwell-based AI servers for rent, too.
Apple released its first major generative AI product this fall. Apple Intelligence is a series of services that can summarize notifications, rewrite emails and generate new emojis. Later this month, it will integrate with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the company says, and next year, Siri will get new abilities to control apps and speak naturally.
Unlike leading chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Apple’s approach to AI isn’t based on large clusters of Nvidia-based servers in the cloud. Instead, Apple uses an iPhone, iPad or Mac chip to do as much of the processing as possible, and then sends complicated queries to Apple-operated servers using its own M-series chips.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang attends a roundtable discussion at the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris on June 11, 2025.
Sarah Meyssonnier | Reuters
Nvidia announced Tuesday that it hopes to resume sales of its H20 general processing units to clients in China, saying that the U.S. government had assured the company would be granted licenses.
Nvidia’s sales of the H20 chips, which had been designed specifically to keep them out of export controls on China, were halted in April.
“The U.S. government has assured NVIDIA that licenses will be granted, and NVIDIA hopes to start deliveries soon,” the company said in a statement.
This comes against the backdrop of a preliminary trade deal between Washington and Beijing last month that sought China to resume rare earth exports and the U.S. to relax tech export controls.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in recent months has ramped up his lobbying against export controls, arguing that they inhibited American tech leadership. In May, Huang said chip restrictions had already cut Nvidia’s China market share nearly in half.
Huang also announced a new “fully compliant” GPU, NVIDIA RTX PRO, saying it was ideal for smart factories and logistics.
The potential change in U.S. stance follows a meeting between Huang and U.S. President Donald Trump last week.
In his meeting with Trump and U.S. policymakers, Huang had reaffirmed Nvidia’s support for the administration’s job creation and onshoring efforts, as well as the aim for America to lead in global AI, the company said.
Meanwhile, in Beijing, it was confirmed that Huang has met with government and industry officials to discuss the benefits of AI and ways for researchers to advance safe and secure AI for the benefit of all.
In this photo illustration, a man seen holding a smartphone with the logo of US artificial intelligence company Cognition AI Inc. in front of website.
Timon Schneider | SOPA Images | Sipa USA | AP
Artificial intelligence startup Cognition announced it’s acquiring Windsurf, the AI coding company that lost its CEO and several other senior employees to Google just days earlier.
Cognition said on Monday that it will purchase Windsurf’s intellectual property, product, trademark, brand and talent, but didn’t disclose terms of the deal. It’s the latest development in an AI talent war, as companies like Meta, Google and OpenAI fiercely compete for top engineers and researchers.
OpenAI had been in talks to acquire Windsurf for about $3 billion in April, but the deal fell apart, and Google said on Friday that it hired Windsurf’s co-founder and CEO Varun Mohan. Google is paying $2.4 billion in licensing fees and for compensation, as CNBC previously reported.
“Every new employee of Cognition will be treated the same way as existing employees: with transparency, fairness, and deep respect for their abilities and value,” Cognition CEO Scott Wu wrote in a memo to employees on Monday. “After today, our efforts will be as a united and aligned team. There’s only one boat and we’re all in it together.”
Cognition didn’t immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment. Windsurf directed CNBC to Cognition.
Cognition is best known for its AI coding agent named Devin, which is designed to help engineers build software faster. As of March, the startup had raised hundreds of millions of dollars at a valuation of close to $4 billion, according to a report from Bloomberg.
Both companies are backed by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. Other investors in Windsurf include Greenoaks, Kleiner Perkins and General Catalyst.
“I’m overwhelmed with excitement and optimism, but most of all, gratitude,” Jeff Wang, the interim CEO of Windsurf, wrote in a post on X on Monday. “Trying times reveal character, and I couldn’t be prouder of how every single person at Windsurf showed up these last three days for each other and for our users.”
Wu said that the acquisition ensures all Windsurf employees are “treated with respect and well taken care of in this transaction.” All employees will participate financially in the deal, have vesting cliffs waived for their work to date and receive fully accelerated vesting for their, according to the memo.
“There’s never been a more exciting time to build,” Wu wrote.
The Grok logo is being displayed on a smartphone with Xai visible in the background in this photo illustration on April 1, 2024.
Jonathan Raa | Nurphoto | Getty Images
The European Union on Monday called in representatives from Elon Musk‘s xAI after the company’s social network X, and chatbot Grok, generated and spread anti-semitic hate speech, including praise for Adolf Hitler, last week.
A spokesperson for the European Commission told CNBC via e-mail that a technical meeting will take place on Tuesday.
xAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Sandro Gozi, a member of Italy’s parliament and member of the Renew Europe group, last week urged the Commission to hold a formal inquiry.
“The case raises serious concerns about compliance with the Digital Services Act (DSA) as well as the governance of generative AI in the Union’s digital space,” Gozi wrote.
X was already under a Commission probe for possible violations of the DSA.
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Grok also generated and spread offensive posts about political leaders in Poland and Turkey, including Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk and Turkish President Recep Erdogan.
Over the weekend, xAI posted a statement apologizing for the hateful content.
“First off, we deeply apologize for the horrific behavior that many experienced. … After careful investigation, we discovered the root cause was an update to a code path upstream of the @grok bot,” the company said in the statement.
Musk and his xAI team launched a new version of Grok Wednesday night amid the backlash. Musk called it “the smartest AI in the world.”
xAI works with other businesses run and largely owned by Musk, including Tesla, the publicly traded automaker, and SpaceX, the U.S. aerospace and defense contractor.
Despite Grok’s recent outburst of hate speech, the U.S. Department of Defense awarded xAI a $200 million contract to develop AI. Anthropic, Google and OpenAI also received AI contracts.