This feels like a classic “everyone becomes a cloud provider” extrapolation that ignores how little of cloud is actually about owning compute and how much is about operating a full dev platform.
Apple isn’t going to turn itself into AWS just because it has servers. This would require a complete shift in their business model, and I highly doubt their will to run a messy infra business it has never shown interest in. SpaceX and Apple have completely opposite cultures.
The companies building giant AI compute for themselves have started renting it out: SpaceX leased all of Colossus to Anthropic, and Meta says a cloud business is on the table. Apple is about to have the most efficient, most private inference fleet on earth. Can it keep that to itself?
Why would Apple’s inference fleet be more efficient? They would need to get into the TPU/water cooling business to make that happen. Apple’s silicon is great but remember it’s based on ARM an already existing ISA with reference designs. The burden to make Apple’s CPU silicon is lower than what it would be to make a TPU.