Let's say good morning to ABC's Mike Debuski, sitting in for Rich Dmiro this week. Mike, Apple's making a big investment in AI in the US.
Yeah, that's right, this five hundred billion dollar investment that they announced earlier this week. This is going to go into a couple different buckets. So there's going to be a new server factory in Texas, just outside of Houston that's going to build these AI specific servers that are designed to basically support their next generation of artificial intelligence technology.
That's one bucket of spending. Another bucket is going to go to hiring a lot of new people at Apple, about twenty thousand, they say over the course of the next four years. Those people are going to be focused on research and development, silicon investing, and of course, artificial intelligence.
Okay, Mike, I have a question for you about these servers, because everybody's saying that, oh, the AI gobbles up so much power and all of that stuff. So what is a server? I mean, is it like a giant ware house with a bunch of computers in it? What does it look like?
Yeah, that's a great question, and it's going to be a question that people are talking about a lot going forward, because you're right, these AI systems, as they become more prominent, as they get added to more and more technologies that we use, they take up a lot of energy. They require a lot of computing power. And people might not know this, but when you run a program on your laptop or you open an app on your phone, oftentimes it's not that device that's doing the computing. It's just
not powerful enough. So it offloads some of that work to what's called a data center, which is as you described, basically just a big building full of computer servers, right,
computers that are dedicated to supporting these technologies. And these data centers are all across the country, all around the world, and they've been building them more frequently given that these technologies that we've been sort of focused on in recent years, everything from the metaverse to cryptocurrencies to now generative artificial
and intelligence, require these huge outlays of computing power. So what this factory that Apple is building in Texas is designed to do is to build the servers that go into those data centers. So it's very behind the scenes. It's not like a computer that you or I would ever really encounter, but It is going to be very, very important for these systems to run more smoothly, run more quickly.
Okay, And why is Apple doing this investment in the US now? Does it have anything to do with Trump tariffs?
It certainly does, in fact overtly so. So last week we saw Apple CEO Tim Cook meet with President Trump at the White House to discuss recent tariffs. Earlier this month, the Trump administration imposed a ten percent tariff on all goods made in China that includes things like the iPhone,
the iPad, and the Mac obviously hugely valuable products for Apple. Now, coming out of that meeting, the President said that Apple will be moving manufacturing to the US, quote because they don't want to pay the tax tariffs and then lo and behold. This week there's a half a trillion dollar investment announced from Apple. So this is as much a
political move as it is a technological move. There's a lens through which you can view this as Apple hedging its bets on the future of artificial intelligence, kind of shoring up the tech infrastructure that's going to undergird that
future technology. And there's a political lens saying, Hey, Apple, I want to extend this Olive branch to the Trump administration saying, hey, we're not quite moving iPhone production to the United States, but we are spending here and can we maybe get a break on some of the tariffs. I think that's kind of what Apple has in mind. Whether that will actually come to pass in reality, I think that remains to be seen, and.
We will be watching for that. And real quick before you go, Amazon's holding an event because somebody is getting a makeover.
Yes, Alexa, and apologies to everyone in California who's Alexa devices. I just activated there. But this is their this is their very popular voice assistant, baked into smarts seas and an app, and there's there's web you know, sort of integrations as well. But this is a voice assistant that, despite its name recognition, has kind of fallen behind other
competitors in the voice assistant space, namely Google Assistant. And Amazon is planning to unveil an all new version of Alexa later today here in New York City, and they say that it's going to be competitive again with an infusion of artificial intelligence. This is another AI story, the same way that we talk to you know, Alexa. Now it's kind of stilted, right, you have to use these
sort of very specific words and phrases. It's kind of awkward given that large language models are designed to replicate human speech. The idea is that your Alexa will be a lot easier to talk to. You can just talk to it like we are talking right now in natural language. That's the promise. Whether that actually works in reality, you know,
we'll we'll have to wait and see. I certainly hope that there is a live demonstration component to this event later today that we can look at to see if it actually does work in the real world, because something that we have to talk about every time we bring up generative AI does have a tendency to go wrong. It makes things up, it gets things wrong, and that means Amazon is taking on a pretty big risk by baking it into one of their most recognizable technologies.
So we'll be asking Alexa, are you lying to us now?
Alexa, what are you talking about?
Yeah, and again, apologies for the name. ABC's Mike Debuski. Thanks so much for the information.
Appreciate it, of course, Amy. Take care