OpenAI Stockpiles Tens of Thousands of Macs to Train Agents
新智元 · wechat · 2026-08-31
The Information reports that OpenAI has purchased tens of thousands of Mac minis and Mac Studios for training computer-use agents, while Anthropic rents Mac compute from AWS. Despite Apple's chips lagging behind NVIDIA in raw power, the Unified Memory architecture (e.g., M5 Ultra with 512GB) and thermal throttling resistance make Macs ideal for long-running LLM and agent tasks. Benchmarks show high-end Macs now match top-tier cloud models in local inference speed. Additionally, macOS licensing restrictions prevent efficient virtualization, necessitating physical hardware stacks and causing shortages. Apple appears unprepared for this enterprise demand, lacking dedicated support teams, while competitors like NVIDIA's DGX Spark move in.
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