OpenAI Buys Thousands Of Mac Minis Triggering Shortages; Pushes Apple To Fast-Track New Models

OpenAI acquired a large number of Apple Mac mini and Mac Studio computers in recent months to train its AI systems and agents. This acquisition is believed to be causing supply shortages, leading Apple to release new versions of the machines sooner than planned. The Information reports that OpenAI's purchases of these Macs are separate from the cloud GPU clusters typically leased by OpenAI for large-scale model training.

Apple's Mac mini and Mac Studio desktops are preferred by AI labs due to their unified memory architecture, which allows the CPU, GPU, and neural engine to access a shared memory pool, making them efficient for reinforcement-learning and computer-use-agent tasks. Meanwhile, Anthropic is reportedly accessing similar hardware through Amazon Web Services instead of purchasing it directly.

Apple's demand for these Macs has caught the company off guard, prompting the release of updated Mac mini and Mac Studio models ahead of its usual schedule. The new Mac mini features the M6 chip, while the Mac Studio offers an M5 Ultra option, with enhanced capability for linking multiple machines together to tackle larger AI workloads.

However, this corporate buying spree has also led to longer wait times for everyday customers, with delivery delays extending well beyond Apple's typical turnaround times. Industry experts attribute part of this shortage to a growing interest in running AI models locally, rather than relying on cloud services, alongside enterprise-scale purchases by AI companies.

The Mac hardware shortage is part of a wider hardware crunch, alongside separate shortages in the AI-PC chip market, with Nvidia's newly launched RTX Spark chips reported to have sold out quickly before reaching store shelves, further exacerbating the overall challenge for AI labs and PC makers competing for hardware capable of running AI models locally during memory component shortages.