Apple could soon do something it rarely does: Trust your data with someone else’s hardware. A new report says the Gemini-powered Siri might route some queries through Google Cloud, powered by Nvidia’s chips.
If you are wondering how Apple plans to keep its privacy promise, Nvidia’s Blackwell B200 chip encrypts your data while it processes it.
Apple’s unusual bet on third-party hardware: Nvidia chips
Apple consistently puts user privacy first, even though that stance can slow things down (as it has in the AI race). The company sinks tons of time and money into developing novel ways to protect users’ data, often with exclusive hardware.
“For software to be secure, it needs to rest on hardware that has security built in,” Apple says. “That’s why Apple devices — with iOS, iPadOS, macOS, tvOS, visionOS, and watchOS — have security capabilities designed into silicon.”
But this time, Apple might rely on third-party hardware to get the job done. A Wednesday report from The Information says Apple is considering tapping into Nvidia’s Blackwell B200 data center chips for certain Siri queries. “Apple will enable Nvidia’s confidential compute feature that encrypts data as it’s being processed on the chips,” according to the publication.
This means your query won’t be visible to anyone, including Google, even if it’s inside a shared cloud environment. Apple reportedly approved this setup before giving a green light to the Google Cloud arrangement.
Designed to handle massive AI models, the Blackwell B200 is Nvidia’s flagship data-center chip. Apple’s decision to use Google’s fleet of B200s would mark a departure from Cupertino’s long-standing philosophy of tightly controlling its hardware.
Apple usually avoids the kind of compromise, which makes the privacy part interesting. Apple seems to be turning to Google’s AI infrastructure instead of relying on its own.
It remains unclear how Private Cloud Compute — Apple’s system for sending queries too complex to handle on-device to a cloud-based server farm built with custom Apple silicon that uses a “hardened operating system designed for privacy” — will coexist alongside the new Google Cloud pipeline. Also, we don’t know exactly how Apple will use on-device AI processing to handle simple queries and hand off the heavier tasks to Nvidia-powered chips.
What does this mean for you?
The new Siri will be powered by Gemini. That means some queries could be processed on hardware not owned by Apple, in a data center that it doesn’t run.
Apple will argue that its confidential computing makes that irrelevant since your data will be encrypted at the chip level. It’s a sophisticated privacy claim that may well hold up. But it’s a huge shift for a company that has built its entire reputation on owning every layer of the experience.
