Apple has joined a consortium to develop next-generation technology to link chips in AI data centers together.
The consortium, the Ultra Accelerator Link Consortium, is developing a standard called UALink to connect AI accelerator chips in a growing number of server farms. As of Tuesday, Apple is a member of the consortium's board of directors, along with Alibaba and semiconductor company Synopsys.
Becky Loop, Apple's director of platform architecture, said in a statement that UALink “shows great potential” in addressing connectivity challenges and creating new opportunities to expand AI capabilities and demand. “There is,” he said.
“Apple has a long history of pioneering and collaborating on innovations that move industries forward, and I'm excited to join UALink's board of directors,” Roop added.
UALink connects chips ranging from GPUs to custom-designed solutions aimed at accelerating the training, fine-tuning, and execution of AI models. The first UALink products based on open standards such as AMD's Infinity Fabric are expected to launch in the next few years.
Intel, AMD, Google, AWS, Microsoft, and Meta are members of the UALink consortium. Not so with Nvidia, the largest maker of AI accelerators. That's likely because Nvidia offers its own interconnect technology, NVLink, for linking chips within data center clusters.
Apple's participation in UALink comes as the company increases its investment in infrastructure to support Apple Intelligence, its suite of AI product capabilities. Apple is reportedly developing new server chips to improve the efficiency of AI data centers, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Some of Apple Intelligence's features have mixed reviews. (My colleague Sara Perez described those features as “boring and utilitarian.”) Last week, Apple announced that it had a number of complaints about tennis star Rafael Nadal's coming out: The company announced it would update one of these features, AI summary news alerts, after users reported seeing accurate headlines. Gay.
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