By Stephen Nellis
San Francisco (Reuters) -Pple CEO Tim Cook signaled on Thursday that the iPhone maker was ready to spend more to catch up with rivals in artificial intelligence by building more data centers or buying a larger player in the segment, a deviation from a long training of tax sfrug.
Apple has trouble keeping pace with rivals such as Microsoft and Alphabet Google, who have both attracted hundreds of millions of users to their AI-driven chatbots and assistants. However, this growth has resulted in steep costs, where Google is planning to spend $ 85 billion in the coming year and Microsoft on schedule to spend more than $ 100 billion, mainly to data centers.
Apple, on the other hand, leaned on external data center providers to handle part of his cloud computing work, and despite a controversial cooperation with Chatgpt Creator OpenAI for certain iPhone functions, tried to grow much of his AI technology in his own home, including improvements in the Siri Virtual Assistant. The results have been rocky, whereby the company will postpone its Siri improvements until next year.
During a conference call after the tax results of the third quarter of the third quarter, analysts noted that Apple traditionally did not do large deals and asked if it could take another approach to pursue his AI ambitions. CEO Cook replied that the company had already taken over seven smaller companies this year and is open to buying larger ones.
“We are very open to mergers and acquisitions that accelerate our route map. We are not tied to a certain company, although those we have acquired so far this year are small in nature,” Cook said. “We actually wonder if a company can help us speed up a route map, and if they do that, we are interested.”
Apple tends to buy smaller companies with highly specialized technical teams to build specific products. The biggest deal ever was the purchase of Beats Electronics for $ 3 billion in 2014, followed by a $ 1 billion deal to buy a modem chip company from Intel.
But now Apple is at a unique intersection for his business. The dozens of billions of dollars per year receive it from Google to be the standard search engine on iPhones, can be canceled by American courts in Google's antitrust test, while startups such as Parmexity are in discussion with handset makers to try to unload Google with a lot of search functions.
Apple leaders have said before the court that they are considering reforming the Safari browser of the company with AI-driven search functions, and Bloomberg News has reported that Apple managers have discussed that he has buyed perplexity, who has not confirmed Reuters independently.
