Hacker News

Apple says it will add 20k jobs, spend $500B, produce AI servers in US

2025-02-2411:05623615www.bloomberg.com

Apple Inc., as it seeks relief from US President Donald Trump’s tariffs on goods imported from China, said that it will hire 20,000 new workers and produce AI servers in the US.

Photographer: Jeenah Moon/Bloomberg

Apple Inc., as it seeks relief from US President Donald Trump’s tariffs on goods imported from China, said that it will hire 20,000 new workers and produce AI servers in the US.

The company said Monday that it plans to spend $500 billion domestically over the next four years, which will include work on a new server manufacturing facility in Houston, a supplier academy in Michigan and additional spending with its existing suppliers in the country. The disclosure comes days after Trump and Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook met in the Oval Office.


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  • By helsinkiandrew 2025-02-2411:09

  • By bryanlarsen 2025-02-2416:335 reply

    • By jtbayly 2025-02-2416:552 reply

      The 2021 announcement works out to $86B per year. The 2025 announcement works out to $125B per year.

      In my mind that’s a pretty substantial increase.

      • By black_puppydog 2025-02-2417:112 reply

        IIUC, that $86B in 2021 plus inflation works out to ~$100B in 2025. So it's a 25% increase then?

        • By DannyBee 2025-02-2418:003 reply

          They paused the last one they announced, so it's an infinite increase if it happens.

          But i expect, once the media cycle dies down, it'll get paused too, and then ignored because can't admit that something didn't work out!

          • By larodi 2025-02-2512:00

            Apple can say whatever they like and we can do whatever we like. Neither side cares immensely about the other, that’s for sure.

            Actually I wonder who is this announce for? Considering the last one died after media hype as op noted.

          • By echelon 2025-02-2418:122 reply

            Does anyone have a list of the times Apple has lied about bringing jobs back to the US (or keeping them here)?

            I recall Apple making a lot of noise about Macbooks being manufactured here, but that they eventually got shipped off to China.

            • By refulgentis 2025-02-2418:231 reply

              No dog in this fight, and I agree with the premise, however there was never a time Apple made a ton of noise about MacBooks being manufactured in the US.

              There was a ton of noise about Mac Pros being manufactured in the US, but sadly, I am not nearly as familiar with Apple after, say 2018*. Not even sure if they have a Mac Pro anymore. :X and if they do, I assume it's not the same model (the black trashcan), so it makes me wonder if they bothered retooling here, or quietly moved it somewhere else

              * TL;Dr at some point it became clear to me Cook is Sculley 2.0. I date it to around walking around NYC and seeing an absurd amount of Apple News bus-stop ads. Services! (TM)

            • By vaxman 2025-02-2520:162 reply

              Apple won the phone wars because it did not allow the Microsoft Windows playbook to repeat itself. The only way to stop that was to hire an expert from a PC company and deploy significant American capital to buy up all the available offshore capacity to efficiently produce that new class of product before the potential competition could even take it seriously. I blame Apple for a lot, but going to bed with the CCP is not one of them. They were forced to play the game that was created by the Taiwanese PC clone manufacturers that used cheap Chinese labor to outcompete American based manufacturers, including Apple. Blame AST and IBM (who, after opening the hardware to create the PC clone business, ironically sold its own to Lenovo in a final spit on America.)

              If Apple didn't take such an investment risk in China, then we'd all have Windows Phones now and Android would have been canceled long ago.

              Bringing it back? The DNC pivoting to expand entitlements beyond sick, elderly and legacy civil rights victims to leverage economic downturns greatly expanded their political base in California and also played a major role in locking the door behind Apple, CISCO and others, leaving all the supporting manufacturing tech and processes to evolve elsewhere. Consider what happened when a billionaire tried to open up Tesla down the road from Apple's original Fremont manufacturing facility. Texas has grown rich building up as a California alternative, but doing more than moving people out of California, actually bringing back overseas operations that would have gone to California had it not devolved into an economic wasteland, required a powerful financial incentive and Trump has finally given one.

              • By paulryanrogers 2025-02-260:41

                > Texas has grown rich building up as a California alternative, but doing more than moving people out of California, actually bringing back overseas operations that would have gone to California had it not devolved into an economic wasteland, required a powerful financial incentive and Trump has finally given one.

                Wasn't Texas a tech hub dating back to TI?

                I doubt anyone will seriously bet on any of Trump's changes since his mercurial temperament and tendency to chase the shiny makes it all so unreliable.

              • By TheKarateKid 2025-02-262:471 reply

                You really think Apple's success with the iPhone is because of them manufacturing them in China? That has nothing to do with it, as hardware pricing is not why Windows Phone failed or even why Android is declining.

                If anything, Apple won by playing exactly the Windows playbook with software: Embrace, extend, extinguish. I'll add a new one: Restrict. (App Store)

                • By vaxman 2025-03-0619:47

                  No, I think Apple's success with iPhone is because they locked competing products out of all available manufacturing capacity for long enough to corner the market. It just so happens that manufacturing capacity was in China, due to the prior era of PC clone manufacturing by Taiwan-based companies.

          • By chairmansteve 2025-02-2418:152 reply

            Yep. With Trump, people make promises, he forgets, they forget. But the base get their little thrill of the day.

            • By dspillett 2025-02-2418:521 reply

              Much as it might be pandering to Trump's nationalist (America first / American only) policies, or simply an action to avoid some of the effects of tariffs that might be imposed, this time around, I see no such connection for the 2021 announcement. Unless they are connected as they are a more generic "pleasing the incoming administration" to try curry favour for when decisions that might affect the company are being made.

            • By decremental 2025-02-2418:384 reply

              He won the popular vote. His base is the majority of Americans lol

              • By shermantanktop 2025-02-2515:531 reply

                Setting specific parties and people aside, that’s not what “the base” means. The base is the diehard supporters. Many an election has been won by taking a minority base and adding in people who are not supporters but chose that candidate for whatever specific reason, e.g. “the price of gas.”

              • By myrandomcomment 2025-02-263:56

                31.78% Trump 30.84% Harris 1.06% third party 36.32% did not vote

                This is hacker news. Respect the data.

              • By paulryanrogers 2025-02-260:45

                He won with fewer votes than Biden got to win in 2020. And not all of those are his 'base'. Many probably didn't even know who Biden is, they just voted for the guy promising to lower prices.

              • By sieabahlpark 2025-02-2512:51

                [dead]

      • By ceejayoz 2025-02-2417:10

        About half of that is just inflation; $86B is $104B now.

    • By Handy-Man 2025-02-2416:381 reply

      Yup.

      "Apple’s most recent announcement on US investment was a 2021 promise to spend $430 billion over the following five years, including a 3,000-employee campus in North Carolina, though development on that project has since paused."

      https://www.theverge.com/news/618172/apple-500-billion-us-in...

      • By dmix 2025-02-2418:25

        Some new things in the article

        - a larger investment number in a previously announced Austin campus

        - new factory in Houston "which will create thousands of jobs"

        - "doubling its $5 billion US Advanced Manufacturing Fund to $10 billion"

        - "It will also open an Apple Manufacturing Academy in Detroit in which Apple engineers and other experts will offer consultations to local businesses on “implementing AI and smart manufacturing techniques,” along with free classes for workers."

    • By dang 2025-02-2417:091 reply

      (This comment was originally posted to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43158187, so "they" was Apple. We merged that thread hither.)

      • By wewewedxfgdf 2025-02-2418:472 reply

        "Hither" sadly underutilized word. Doubly true for "thither"

        • By lemoncucumber 2025-02-250:58

          It's a shame hither/thither/whither and their buddies hence/thence/whence are all archaic at this point

        • By kridsdale3 2025-02-2421:52

          Follow those two up with a `yon` and buddy, you got a stew brewin'

    • By blitzar 2025-02-2422:07

      They are focused on sustainability, why not extend it to recycling investments.

    • By evereverever 2025-02-2417:58

      Yep, just with less Austin Texas.

  • By abalone 2025-02-2422:449 reply

    Some useful context: this is almost certainly being driven by Apple’s Private Cloud Compute architecture and not tariffs, as an investment of this magnitude is not planned overnight.

    Why is PCC driving Apple to spend billions to build servers in the states? Because it is insane from a security standpoint (insanely awesome).

    PCC is an order of magnitude more secure server platform than has ever been deployed for consumer use at planet scale. Secure and private enough to literally send your data and have it processed server side instead of on device without having to trust the host (Apple).[1] Until now the only way to do that was on device. If you sent your data for cloud processing, outside of something exotic like homomorphic encryption[2], you’d still have to trust that the host did a good job protecting your data, using it responsibly, and wasn’t compromised. Not the case with PCC.

    To accomplish this Apple uses its own custom chips with Secure Enclaves that provide a trust foundation for the whole system, ultimately cryptographically guaranteeing that the binaries processing your data have been publicly audited by independent security auditors. This is the so called hardware root of trust.

    It is essential then that the hardware deployed in data centers has not been physically tampered with. Without that the whole thing falls apart. So Apple has a whole section in their security white paper detailing an audited process for deploying data center hardware and ensuring supply chain integrity.[3]

    You can imagine how that is the weak point in the system made more robust by managing it in the US. Tighter supply chain control.

    [1] https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/

    [2] Fun fact, Apple also just deployed a homomorphic encryption powered search engine! It’s also insane!

    [3] https://security.apple.com/documentation/private-cloud-compu...

    • By ipaddr 2025-02-2423:098 reply

      Trusting Secure Enclaves custom chips over processing locally is going to be a hard to impossible sell for those who truly care about privacy.

      Thankfully for Apple that's a very low number in a world where people demand tiktok remain legal when shown how their data is being used by foreign actors. People only care about privacy when it's local (don't want mother to find out, neighbours to talk, friend to think a certain way about you or classmate stalking) and that's why ai fakes are much more concern then a company knowing everything you do.

      But this product is great for fortune 500 businesses.

      • By addicted 2025-02-2423:182 reply

        I think this is a level of security Apple is providing at additional cost to themselves that only a tiny fraction of consumers would even pay an extra cent for.

        From that perspective I really appreciate this effort by Apple.

      • By nobankai 2025-02-2423:221 reply

        Yup. Apple knows that they don't have to ship anything more than a whitepaper to justify their stance to current customers. They could announce an internet-connected bidet with a webcam and there would still be people arguing that it's safe until someone exploits it.

        The fact that Apple is comfortable shipping a whitelabel ChatGPT is proof that the whole Private Cloud Compute thing is just for show. They're perfectly happy partnering with the Worldcoin guy to sell you something popular if there's money in it for them. Apple knows people expect them to release some haughty whitepaper, so they cook up PCC and claim you can audit it if they think you're worthy of seeing the insides. Now all the privacy nuts can pipe down while Apple plans a longer-term strategy to make their hardware compete in the datacenter.

        There is a world where Apple takes their own privacy commitment to the next level through radical transparency. But that's not what PCC is, it's another puppet for the Punch-and-Judy security theater that sells their iCloud subscriptions.

        • By abalone 2025-02-253:29

          PCC is completely different from the ChatGPT integration. ChatGPT is indeed not a privacy-hardened system, but Apple devices only use it for so called “world knowledge” queries and make you confirm when calling out to it, typically involving limited personal data.

          PCC is designed to handle extensive personal data, and the auditing is attested by cryptographic proofs provided to software clients, not just white papers read by humans. It is significantly different from what we’ve seen before in the industry, and highly worth the effort to understand it if you are at all involved in server engineering.

      • By transpute 2025-02-250:071 reply

        > Trusting Secure Enclaves custom chips over processing locally is going to be a hard to impossible sell for those who truly care about privacy.

        Isn't local processing on Apple devices rooted in the same secure enclave hardware/firmware, attacked and hardened for 10+ years?

        • By int_19h 2025-02-251:412 reply

          The problem with any remote arrangement is that you have to trust Apple that the server side is running all that stuff. Their answer to that is "you can audit us", but I don't see how that would prevent them from switching things in between audits.

          As far as local processing goes, though, you're also still fundamentally trusting Apple that the OS binaries you get from them do what they say they do. Since they have all the signing keys, they could easily push an iOS update that extracts all the local data and pushes it to some server somewhere.

          Now, I don't think that either of these scenarios is likely to happen if it's down to Apple by itself - they don't really gain anything from doing so. But they could be compelled by a government large and important enough that they can't just pull out. For example, if US demanded such a thing (like it already did in the past), and the executive made a concerted push to force it.

          • By transpute 2025-02-251:55

              you have to trust Apple that the server side is running all that stuff
            Remote attestation should be proving to the client that the server is running the expected firmware and PCC software hashes, https://security.apple.com/documentation/private-cloud-compu.... Apple has released (some? all?) source for PCC software on the server, https://github.com/apple/security-pcc

            > When a user’s device sends an inference request to Private Cloud Compute, the request is sent end-to-end encrypted to the specific PCC nodes needed for the request. The PCC nodes share a public key and an attestation — cryptographic proof of key ownership and measurements of the software running on the PCC node — with the user’s device, and the user’s device compares these measurements against a public, append-only ledger of PCC software releases.

            > compelled by a government

            Sadly, the bar is much lower than "compel". Devices are routinely compromised by zero-day vulnerabilities sold by exploit brokers to multiple parties on the open market, including governments. Especially any device with cellular, wifi or bluetooth radios. Hopefully the Apple C1 modem starts a new trend in radio baseband hardening, including PAC, ASLR and iBoot, https://www.reuters.com/technology/apple-reveals-first-custo...

          • By abalone 2025-02-253:20

            > Their answer to that is "you can audit us", but I don't see how that would prevent them from switching things in between audits.

            PCC does actually prevent Apple from switching things in between audits to a high degree. It’s not like a food safety inspection. The auditor signs the hardware in a multi party key ceremony and they employ other countermeasure like chassis tamper switches. PCC clients use a protocol that ensures whatever they are connecting to has a valid signature. This is detailed in Apple’s documentation.[1]

            See, this is why I think privacy engineering is low key the most cutting edge aspect of server development. Previously held axioms are made obsolete by architectural advancements. I think we’re looking at a once in 15 year leap - the previous ones being microservices and web based architecture.

            [1] https://security.apple.com/documentation/private-cloud-compu...

      • By tstrimple 2025-02-253:08

        At some point having trained and certified Apple engineers overseeing this sort of thing gives far more confidence than random startup #1345134 who promises they hired the best college drop outs that they could find.

      • By xpe 2025-02-250:40

        Everything about democracy is great except its people. You know, the big brained carbon lifeforms that refer to themselves as “citizens”.

      • By r00fus 2025-02-2518:39

        > Trusting Secure Enclaves custom chips over processing locally

        If you're using Apple hardware, it's the same technology in your local device anyway, right?

      • By throwaway2037 2025-02-253:10

            > for those who truly care about privacy
        Is this the new "No true Scotsman" test on HN?

    • By szvsw 2025-02-252:072 reply

      <<<security is not my domain, asking genuine questions!!>>>

      At the end of the day, it ultimately still boils down to trust though, yes? Trust that they are running the data centers the way they say they are, trust that their supply chain is what they say it is, and so on? At the same time, using some open source piece of software also entails a great amount of trust: I’m not going through the source code of Signal myself, and I’m also not checking that an open source locally served model isn’t sending traffic/telemetry etc back to some remote server via whatever software is running the model… rather, I’m placing my trust in the open source community that others have inspected and tested these things. I’m sure all sorts of shady PRs into important open source code bases are made on the reg after all. So that’s not to say that trusting Apple is necessarily more or less wise than trusting open source software from a security standpoint… my point is just that it seems like they are aspiring to a zero trust architecture, but at the end of the day, it does still require trust that they are operating in good faith vis-a-vis what they are representing in the white papers right? To me, it seems like a relatively safe assumption that they are for a variety of reasons, but nonetheless, it is an assumption right?

      • By abalone 2025-02-252:591 reply

        > I’m placing my trust in the open source community

        You’re right, security is a matter of degrees not absolutes, but open source software requires considerably less trust than closed source. Right?

        PCC applies this principle by making the binaries it runs public and auditable by you or anyone in the security community. (In some cases the source code as well.) The craziness is in the architecture that provides cryptographic proof to clients that the server they’re connecting to is running an audited binary and running on secure hardware. It even does TLS termination at the shard level so you can have high confidence that if the binary isn’t connecting to anything your data will be unreadable by any other server in the org.

        So it goes way beyond trusting what the whitepaper says. Data center hardware deployments are audited by a third party that signs the servers in a key ceremony. That ultimately undergirds the cryptographic attestation that servers provide to clients that everything has been audited. And it’s also the element that tighter supply chain control helps shore up.

        If you’re new to security the architecture documentation I linked to is a very friendly read and a good intro to some of these threats, countermeasures and rationales.

        • By szvsw 2025-02-253:111 reply

          Thank you for the really great response! It answered my main question:

          > The craziness is in the architecture that provides cryptographic proof to clients that the server they’re connecting to is running an audited binary and running on secure hardware.

          I definitely missed this concept when skimming the links before posting my comment - very very cool!

          > open source software requires considerably less trust than closed source. Right?

          Of course… but at the same time, I think the difference in the degree of trust I am placing in say, Signal’s end to end encryption and Apple’s (claims of) end-to-end encryption is not as large as it might cursorily seem. Would I be more surprised to read in the news that Apple had secretly embedded some back door than I would be reading in the news that malicious actor managed to push some hidden exploit through to Signal in an otherwise innocent PR? I’m genuinely not sure which would surprise me more, or which event would be more probable, so can I really make any claim as to which is more secure, given the current knowledge I have? Obviously I could think more deeply about this, but superficially, both are requiring pretty large amounts of trust from me - which I don’t think is misplaced in either… though I do personally trust something like signal more at the end of the day based on… what, intuition? A gut feeling?

          • By abalone 2025-02-254:01

            That’s good food for thought! I would just add that the kinds of threats PCC is primarily targeting, I think, are attacks by malicious third parties (including state actors), rogue internal employees, and privacy-leaking software bugs. These are sort of bread and butter real world threats.

            I would go out on a limb and say Apple would love to also prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they too as an organization cannot get away with planting a secret back door — not because they have pure angelic hearts, but because this is good for their privacy-differentiated business model. And PCC certainly makes a huge leap in that direction. But it’s not the problem it’s primarily targeting nor an easy one to solve completely.

            As another example, Apple has an implementation of OHTTP onion routing[1] called iCloud Private Relay. It’s really cool and easy to use. The point is to make it so nobody but you can tell what website your IP address is connecting to, not even Apple, the operator of the relay. But bottom line, Apple picks who they collaborate with for the gateways and there’s nothing stopping them from colluding out of band to de-anonymize you if that’s what they wanted to do.

            Does this defeat the purpose of iCloud Private Relay? No. Its purpose is to better protect you from common privacy attacks, better than a traditional VPN would. It happens to also narrow the trust you need to place in Apple, namely that they would need to collude with another company to defeat the system as opposed to some rogue lone wolf SRE deciding to access your logs. But it wasn’t put in place to make people who fundamentally distrust Apple as a company start trusting them.

            [1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc9458/

      • By 1659447091 2025-02-253:151 reply

        > At the end of the day, it ultimately still boils down to trust though, yes?

        Isn't that pretty much the story for most every thing though? It comes down to discernment, which is mostly subjective itself.

        Same here. Personally, do I trust Apple? I don't have a leaning one way or another about that. What I trust is that Capitalism is gonna capitalize. And Apple doing what it says here, is its Brand. If down the road it comes out later it was all a lie. That Brand has no more standing. No more standing, no more sales. And Apple is in the Brand/product selling business. I trust they won't throw away their trillions because they would rather sell their Brand on white papers over an actual product that the papers describe.

        • By szvsw 2025-02-253:26

          Yes, I think along similar lines there… but on the other hand, brands need not reflect underlying truths about reality, and in fact often do not. Suppose two years from now, it is revealed by a whistleblower that they were part of a special skunkworks team responsible for creating various backdoors in PCC in order to enable Apple to access the data, train new models on queries, or maybe respond to government requests etc etc, all of which which were subtle, complicated exploits. Maybe Apple denies and discredits, or minimizes, or issues some sort of limited mea culpa. To what extent would it affect Apple’s brand? How long would it stay in the public consciousness? Would people (writ large, not those on HN) care? Perhaps it impacts sales and the stock price, but for how long and to what extent? Obviously there would be some sort of cost to such an event occurring, but would it outweigh whatever benefits that Apple might gain in the meantime? Maybe those benefits have to do with avoiding the wrath of the federal government… who knows. There’s definitely a world where the amoral calculus suggests lying might be better, right? Maybe not ours, but it is plausible. Like you said, discernment is the only tool we have, and it’s difficult to really know what’s going on at the end of the day.

          Moscow rules and George Smiley’s tradecraft are probably the only real security… ha!

    • By pl4nty 2025-02-250:023 reply

      > Until now the only way to do that was on device

      as usual, Apple's implementation is exceptional, but far from the first. see https://confidentialcomputing.io/ and its long history

      • By transpute 2025-02-250:162 reply 

          2019 Linux Foundation Confidential Computing
  2015 Intel SGX (Skylake)
  2014 Apple Secure Enclave (A8, iPhone 6)

      • By abalone 2025-02-254:12

        Absolutely right. My comment was strictly about “for consumer use at planet scale.” It’s the aggressive adoption and rollout of confidential computing architecture in an easy to use consumer platform that I’m celebrating here. (Including a 12 figure financial commitment!) Prior to PCC, smartphones generally had to process data on device to ensure privacy.

    • By flashman 2025-02-254:17

      > It is essential then that the hardware deployed in data centers has not been physically tampered with. Without that the whole thing falls apart.

      am i wrong or does this just change the threat from Chinese to US government tampering

      and if third-party auditing can detect hardware tampering then why does it matter where the hardware is manufactured

    • By gigel82 2025-02-251:283 reply

      PCC is an awesome solution for Apple to ensure that no one other than Apple can execute code in that environment.

      That is however not most users' concern (in fact, I'd guess less than 0.001% of Apple users are concerned with supply chain attacks on Apple's servers); what we're concerned with is Apple itself misusing our data in some way (for example, to feed into their growing advertising business, or to redirect to authorities). PCC does NOT solve any of this and it's in fact an unsolvable solution as long as their server side code is closed source (or otherwise unavailable for self-hosting as binaries). For me, Apple Intelligence stays off on my devices (and when that is no longer an option, I'm jumping ship - I just wish there was something at least passable to jump to).

      • By abalone 2025-02-254:501 reply

        > what we're concerned with is Apple itself misusing our data in some way… and it’s in fact an unsolvable solution as long as their server side code is closed source (or otherwise unavailable for self-hosting as binaries)

        It is in fact a solvable problem. The binaries are indeed available for self hosting in a virtualized PCC node for research purposes.[1] Auditors can confirm that the binaries do not transmit data outside of the environment. There are several other aspects of the architecture that are designed to prevent use data from leaking outside of the node’s trust boundary, for example TLS terminates at the node level and nodes use encrypted local storage so user data is unreadable to any other node / part of the organization.

        [1] https://security.apple.com/documentation/private-cloud-compu...

        • By gigel82 2025-02-255:49

          That is a lot of mumbo-jumbo but what it boils down to is that you cannot run the PCC on your own hardware; you can download some "components" whose hash matches the supposed "transparency log" they publish (and some demo models) but since I can't go into my iPhone to say "set PCC server ip: 192.168.1.42" and see it work, I don't trust it (and it cannot be trusted).

      • By nroach 2025-02-251:551 reply

        Are these the droids you’re looking for? https://github.com/apple/security-pcc

        • By gigel82 2025-02-255:42

          No, that is not the PCC, just some research artifacts.

      • By r00fus 2025-02-2519:201 reply

        > PCC is an awesome solution for Apple to ensure that no one other than Apple can execute code in that environment.

        Doesn't PCC guarantee even more than that? From my reading, Apple can't exfiltrate any data to other servers (even ones that Apple owns) nor can they inject any processing other than what is outlined into that server. Otherwise, what's the point of such a stringent hardware integrity requirement?

        • By gigel82 2025-02-2521:02

          There is no way to verify that. It's just something they "pinky swear they won't do". The stringent hardware integrity is to protect against supply chain attacks (Apple making sure they fully control the stack down to the hardware and can run any software they want that connects to any external service they desire - such as the CCP, NSA, 3rdPartyAds, etc.)

    • By vaxman 2025-02-2520:29

      PCC is a kludge for mitigating battery life on smartphones doing Personal Assistant work, for knowing what their chances of getting nVidia chip allocations are, for knowing how unreliable nVidia hardware is --basically for having been caught with their pants down when genAI took off. That said, it's a good kludge.

      The easy fix is to add more vector cores and RAM to the chips and shrink them to use less power, but it takes time and initially these go to power cord systems (first in the kludge, then maybe MacPro and some kind of AI-hub that sits in your living room and vehicle), then..well you wonder why the small form factor iPhone just was dc'ed?

    • By conradev 2025-02-252:151 reply

      It's worth noting that AWS has had this sort of infrastructure with Nitro for quite some time now:

      https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/nitro/nitro-enclaves/

      At some point it was novel to put a separate hardware root of trust on a PCI-e card but I think that was a while ago, even for Apple!

      • By abalone 2025-02-254:33

        Nitro is good! And showcases a great many of the foundational architectural concepts in PCC.

        But there is a major difference that is germane to the topic of Apple’s investment in US server manufacturing: The hardware root of trust. Hardware tampering is the weak point and afaik AWS doesn’t describe any process to certify their supply chain integrity. I think the most they’ve done is commission a review of their architecture document.[1] PCC actually has an auditor sign each server node in the datacenter.

        Thank you for mentioning them though. It’s an important advancement in generally available confidential computing infrastructure.

        [1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/aws-nitro-system-gets-i...

    • By timewizard 2025-02-252:24

      > this is almost certainly being driven by Apple’s Private Cloud Compute architecture and not tariffs, as an investment of this magnitude is not planned overnight.

      The tarriffs haven't happened overnight. They've been discussed for going on 2 full years now. Anyone who wasn't blinded by their own political preferences saw this coming.

    • By yalogin 2025-02-254:11

      I think this is conjecture, there is no indication anywhere that it’s driven by the PCC data centers. If anything I would guess they are trying to build hardware in the US. That has to be the only reason to invest that much.

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