According to The Information, OpenAI and other AI labs have bought tens of thousands of Mac minis and Mac Studios. OpenAI uses them to train computer-use agents that autonomously handle multi-step tasks. The company wants more, but the most powerful models have been sold out for months thanks to a memory chip shortage. Anthropic is in on it too, renting Mac minis through AWS.

It's not just the big labs. The Mac mini is picking up steam as a local AI computer, partly fueled by the OpenClaw hype. Strong chips, shared memory, and solid cooling make them well suited for long-running AI workloads. Nvidia's DGX Spark offers a compact alternative but takes a different approach, leaning on dedicated GPU power with CUDA and Tensor cores instead of Apple's unified memory architecture.

The open-source software Exo lets users link multiple Macs into a cluster to run large models locally. Peter Voell, formerly on OpenAI's computing infrastructure team, is even building an Apple-based cloud service called Mount Thor. Apple's Mac revenue jumped nearly 29 percent to $10.4 billion in the June quarter.