Report says Apple is speeding up its M7 Ultra chip for AI servers

In short: A report says Apple is accelerating development of its next high-end chips, building on AI hardware work that started during its cancelled self-driving car project.

What happened

Apple once spent years trying to build a self-driving car, but the project never became a real product. According to reporting cited by The Verge, that effort still influenced Apple’s chip design because a car would have needed a lot of AI computing done directly on the device.

That push helped lead to Apple’s “Neural Engine,” a part of Apple chips that is made for AI tasks. Think of it like a dedicated lane on a highway for certain kinds of traffic, so those jobs do not slow everything else down. The Neural Engine first appeared in the iPhone X’s A11 Bionic chip and was used for features like Face ID and Animoji.

Now, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman in his Power On newsletter, Apple plans to make AI-focused chip hardware a bigger part of its strategy. The report says Apple is skipping the usual Pro, Max, and Ultra versions of its upcoming M6 chip. Instead, Apple is said to be speeding up work on the M7, which could arrive in the first half of 2027 with major Neural Engine upgrades.

The report also says an “M7 Ultra” chip could be used in a new Apple server product. A server is a powerful computer that runs services for many people at once, like a kitchen that cooks for a whole restaurant. Gurman expects the M7 Ultra to support up to 1.5TB of RAM, which is the short-term memory a computer uses to juggle lots of tasks at once.

Why it matters

If Apple puts more AI computing into its own chips, it can run more features directly on your device and send less data to online servers. That can affect speed, cost, and privacy, even for people who never think about what chip is inside their phone or laptop.

Source: The Verge AI