On Thursday, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook said the company is ready to spend more money to stay competitive in the artificial intelligence area. This might mean building more data centers or buying a bigger company in the industry, which is a change from how Apple has usually spent money before.
Apple has had trouble keeping up with companies like Microsoft and Google, which have attracted a lot of users with their AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants. But this effort has cost a lot of money. Google plans to spend $85 billion over the next year, and Microsoft is expected to spend more than $100 billion, mostly for data centers.
Apple has mostly used outside companies for its cloud computing needs. Even though it worked with OpenAI, the company that made ChatGPT, to add some features to the iPhone, it has focused on making its own AI technology. This includesso improving Siri, its virtual assistant. But the results have been mixed, so Apple has delayed some of Siri’s updates until next year.
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After Apple’s third-quarter earnings call, analysts noticed that the company has usually avoided big purchases and asked if Apple might change its approach to reach its AI goals. Cook said Apple has already bought seven smaller companies this year and is open to buying bigger ones too.
”We are very open to mergers and acquisitions that can help us move faster toward our goals,” Cook said. “We are not only interested in small companies, although the ones we’ve bought so far this year are smaller. We look at whether a company can help us move our roadmap forward, and if it can, we are interested. “
Apple typically buys smaller companies with specialized teams to improve its products. Its biggest purchase was the $3 billion deal for Beats Electronics in 2014, followed by a $1 billion acquisition of a modem chip company from Intel.
