Power of Apple's M7 & M8 chips was born from Apple Car research

We've been telling you this for years — Apple Car research wasn't lit on fire, and the fruits of Apple's labor on it will be seen in artificial intelligence performance in the M7 and M8 processor.

Before AI used to be called Apple's biggest failure, that title went to the Apple Car which was cancelled after ten years of development and ten billion dollars of investment. AppleInsider argued at the time that Apple Car research would pay off, but now both of these failures are being recast as positives, with Bloomberg saying this research is being used in designing future AI processors.

The report claims that for the future M7 and M8 processors, Apple is concentrating more on AI support than on issues such as overall speed and power efficiency. This reportedly means that these chip designs for the Mac and Apple Intelligence servers are based on the company's efforts toward a self-driving car.

When that car was cancelled in 2024, AppleInsider said exactly this based on how, for one thing, Apple Car staff were redeployed to what was then John Giannandrea's AI team. But there had long been clues and even, for Apple, close to public confirmation that the Car was an AI project.

"We're focusing on autonomous systems," began Tim Cook as long ago as June 2017, "and clearly, one purpose of autonomous systems are self-driving cars. There are others."

Just saying that much was unusual for Apple, which normally never comments on future products or plans. Yet Cook went further and specified why Apple was doing a car.

"We sort of see it as the mother of all AI projects," he said. "It's probably one of the most difficult AI projects actually to work on and so autonomy is something that's incredibly exciting for us, but we'll see where it takes us."

That was nine years ago, half a decade before ChatGPT was released to the public. Yet perhaps because Apple usually referred to it as Machine Learning, the consensus in the technology industry kept being that Apple was caught out by AI.

Apple has certainly been behind compared to the massive spending on AI datacenters, but it's meant that it also hasn't overspent. In June 2026, for example, it was revealed that OpenAI was losing $1.25 for every $1 it earned, and investors are turning back to Apple.