Have you read the headlines about how difficult and expensive it is to procure NVIDIA GPUs?
Apple has an enormous hardware advantage over Google, Microsoft, and even OpenAI in the space if the constraint is hardware. If software ends up being the "easy part" and hardware remains difficult, Apple is in a great spot between the volume of hardware they're already moving and their cash reserves.
> Apple has an enormous hardware advantage over Google, Microsoft, and even OpenAI in the space if the constraint is hardware.
The constraint isn't hardware. Google, Microsoft and OpenAI are buying datacenter-scale Nvidia hardware that Apple quite literally does not ship the equivalent of. There are no Macs that support DGX-sized workloads, and attempting to make one seems like a suicide mission a-la Xserve. Nobody is buying what Apple's selling, in the server market.
Apple and Nvidia both compete over new TSMC nodes, and with Nvidia reaching a trillion (!!!) dollar valuation you'd be foolish to assume they're not outbidding Apple as we speak. All things being equal, Nvidia is probably Apple's greatest threat in pure compute-per-watt: https://browser.geekbench.com/opencl-benchmarks
Apple has an enormous hardware advantage over Google, Microsoft, and even OpenAI in the space if the constraint is hardware. If software ends up being the "easy part" and hardware remains difficult, Apple is in a great spot between the volume of hardware they're already moving and their cash reserves.