A new report indicates Apple has joined the Ultra Accelerator Link Consortium’s board of directors, giving it powers to have a say in how AI server infrastructure evolves.

Apple’s big promises are on Apple Intelligence hasn’t delivered yet, and the company is now lagging slightly behind its hyperactive AI competitors. We just got some Awesome AI leak for the upcoming Galaxy S25 phones, which, if true, means Samsung may be throwing an unapologetic challenge at Apple when it comes to AI. However, Cupertino is not ready to back down yet and has now reached a very strong position.

the The Ultra Accelerator Link Consortium develops standards that are essential to advance AI models and accelerators. In simple terms, the group is influential on the future of AI itself. On the board, we have Microsoft, Google, Meta, etc., and now, also guess who: Apple. Samsung does not currently appear to be part of that group. The group now consists of more than 65 companies.

–Becky Loeb, director of platform engineering at Apple

UALink is focused on developing technical specifications for accelerators, the technology found between GPUs and AI chips, allowing the chips to quickly communicate with each other as if they were part of a single larger chip. This technology is similar to what Apple uses for its Ultra chips for Macs, making it possible to integrate two Max chips together.

Essentially, interconnected chips will allow for improved performance when it comes to developing and processing artificial intelligence.

Apple’s involvement with the group is likely to bring significant benefits in the long term. Apple could benefit from developing high-performance AI chip servers: better hardware could speed up how quickly AI models learn while also helping to run a greater number of processes simultaneously.

For all you iPhone lovers out there, this will optimize the servers used for cloud-based queries. Of course, Apple tries to have most of its AI queries on-device (rewrites, notification summaries, among many other things), but more stringent queries are processed in the cloud (email summaries, web page summaries). It is understood that if you have faster servers, you will get your answer faster.

And Apple would be able, I would say, to steal like an artist. Essentially, he can take what he learned in the group and incorporate it into his own devices. This could mean that advances in the A-series chips would make on-device AI faster and more capable on iPhones.

Work on this technology is still in its infancy, so it may be some time before we see it actually implemented. At the same time, Apple should do its best to achieve what it wants Apple intelligence promises, which it is expected to do (at least in part) with rumors that Siri 2.0 will come with it iOS 18.3 or later iOS 18.4.

Generative AI is the thing every tech company is talking about right now, and the race is real. Samsung, Apple and others are facing off over who will deliver better, more sophisticated AI on their phones. We hope that Apple’s work with the consortium will help surprise us in the near future with The real AI deal.