Report: OpenAI Purchases Tens of Thousands of Apple Mac mini / Studio to Train AI Agents to Operate Computers
August 31, IT Home reported: According to The Information, OpenAI has purchased tens of thousands of Apple Mac mini and Mac Studio computers in recent months to train AI systems capable of operating computers.
These Macs are not used for the large-scale pre-training of OpenAI's foundational models, but primarily for reinforcement learning tasks. During this training process, AI agents need to repeatedly practice completing various operational tasks in a real computer environment.
It is understood that OpenAI primarily purchased Mac products equipped with large unified memory, utilizing these devices to run models and training workloads related to "computer-operating AI agents."
This type of hardware provides a real computer operating environment for AI models, enabling them to learn how to navigate software interfaces, interact with applications, and complete various computer tasks. Through such an environment, AI agents can undergo repeated training and evaluation.
OpenAI's massive purchase of Macs also reflects the rapidly growing demand for high-memory Apple computers across the entire AI industry.
Currently, Mac minis and Mac Studios equipped with large memory capacities have become harder to purchase, with some models being out of stock for consecutive months. AI companies particularly value these configurations because Apple's unified memory architecture allows the CPU and GPU to access the same large memory pool.
Apple does not disclose specific sales figures for individual Mac product models. However, Apple's overall Mac business achieved a record $9.4 billion in revenue (IT Home note: approximately 63.
316 billion RMB at current exchange rates) for the quarter ending in June, a year-over-year increase of about 29%.
In fact, Apple had already felt the boost in sales of small desktop computers driven by AI demand during the quarter ending in June, which consequently brought about supply constraints.
Apple CEO Tim Cook stated during the earnings call in July this year: "We are seeing more and more customers starting to leverage these capabilities, from using Mac mini as a powerful platform for running agentic AI, to deploying Mac Studio clusters to run frontier-level models locally."
Cook also mentioned that Mac products faced supply constraints during the quarter due to "very strong" market demand.
Recently, Apple also launched new Mac minis equipped with M6 and M5 Pro chips, while updating the Mac Studio lineup with new models featuring M5 Max and M5 Ultra chips.
Besides OpenAI, other AI companies are adopting similar approaches.
According to reports, Anthropic has been renting Mac mini computing power through Amazon Web Services (AWS). As more AI developers begin looking for hardware suitable for running specific AI workloads, Apple's self-developed chips, with their large unified memory configurations, are becoming an increasingly popular choice in the AI industry.