Mac Minis Become Darling of AI Labs as Sales Surge
OpenAI and Anthropic have been buying up Mac mini stocks in large quantities, reportedly emptying out Apple's inventory. The powerful machines are being used to train AI models, specifically for reinforcement learning tasks. According to reports, these labs are connecting entire clusters of Mac minis together to pool memory and house giant models.
Apple has seen a significant boost in sales due to this trend, with Mac sales jumping by almost 29% for the quarter, reaching around $10 billion. This is an unusual spike for the lineup, which has not seen such numbers in years.
The labs are using the Mac's Apple Silicon chip to its advantage, as it allows for efficient memory sharing between the CPU, GPU, and Neural Engine. In contrast, Nvidia GPUs require constant data transfer between video memory and system memory, wasting time and watts with every transfer.