Apple has laid out a new roadmap to restructure its operations to fit the age of artificial intelligence, by developing a new generation of processors, a step that reflects a strategic shift in the company's priorities.

With the growing role of artificial intelligence in determining chip design and launch schedules, leaked information has revealed Apple's future plans to redraw the development roadmap for Mac processors, alongside processors dedicated to servers running Apple Intelligence services in data centers.

According to Bloomberg, Apple is preparing to make unprecedented changes to the Mac processor development cycle, as it intends to launch the basic M6 processor this fall, before abandoning for the first time completing the traditional family of processors with Pro, Max, and Ultra versions, to move directly to developing the next generation M7 at a faster pace than usual.

Accelerated Steps

The leaks indicate that the company has completed the final design freeze for the M7 processor only about six months after starting the same process for the M6, a timeline that reflects a clear priority to accelerate the introduction of broad improvements in neural processing and AI capabilities.

The M7 is expected to be introduced in the first half of 2027, followed by M7 Pro and M7 Max later that year, while the M7 Ultra arrives during 2028.

The information says this latest version will carry the biggest technological leaps, with performance expected to approach that of specialized AI accelerators used in data centers, such as NVIDIA's Blackwell platform, which may open the door to running more advanced AI models directly on Mac devices.

Apple's plans are not limited to personal computers, as the information indicates that the company intends to employ the same technologies in the cloud infrastructure for the Apple Intelligence ecosystem. While it is preparing to soon deploy new servers based on the M5 Ultra processor under a project codenamed J246, the company's engineers are already working on a more advanced server platform based on M7 Ultra technologies, expected to enter service by 2029.

According to the leaks, these servers will support up to 1.5 terabytes of memory, nearly double the capacity targeted in the generation based on M5 Ultra, giving Apple greater ability to run AI models and provide its cloud services based on Apple Intelligence, although the implementation of these plans remains tied to global memory market conditions and supply availability.

Apple Car Project

The information also reveals that Apple has already started work on the subsequent M8 generation, along with other projects codenamed Soko and Cardinal, with a trend towards using more advanced manufacturing technologies at 1.4-nanometer precision, aiming to improve performance efficiency, reduce power consumption, and enhance AI capabilities in future generations.

Although these plans seem directly linked to the current AI race, their roots go back to a completely different project that Apple stopped two years ago.

When the company decided to cancel its autonomous car development project in 2024, the decision at the time seemed like the end of one of its biggest technological bets, after nearly a decade of work that included thousands of employees and investments exceeding $10 billion, along with the development of specialized research centers and the registration of hundreds of patents.

But the project, which did not result in a commercial car, left behind a technological legacy that has now become a central part of Apple's strategy in the field of artificial intelligence.

In the early stages of the project, the company aimed to develop a vehicle with full Level 5 autonomous driving capabilities, the level that assumes the car can operate without any human intervention under various conditions.

Achieving this goal forced Apple to invest early in areas such as machine learning, computer vision, and real-time data processing.

Because autonomous driving systems require processing massive amounts of data from cameras and sensors in real time, the company began developing dedicated chips capable of performing complex AI operations locally inside the vehicle, without relying on continuous connection to cloud servers.

From these efforts came one of the most important technical components in Apple's modern ecosystem: the Neural Engine, designed to accelerate AI and machine learning operations on devices.

The Neural Engine first appeared to users with the iPhone X in 2017, enabling features such as Face ID and Animoji, before gradually becoming an essential element in almost all Apple chips.

Technological Leap

With Apple's transition to Apple Silicon processors for Macs in 2020, the company began to leverage the expertise gained during the car project within the computer sector.

The Neural Engine was integrated into various Mac processors, giving devices advanced capability to run AI models locally, an approach that has become one of the main pillars of Apple's strategy in this field.

The expertise gained from developing chips dedicated to autonomous driving also contributed to the development of high-performance Ultra-class processors, which later became the basis for the company's plans for Apple Intelligence servers.

Thus, the technologies born within the car project are no longer limited to personal computers; their impact has extended to the cloud infrastructure that Apple's AI services rely on, including servers designed to handle the most complex requests that cannot be executed locally on users' devices.

Although the project officially ended, many of the technologies developed during it continued to transfer to other products within the company. The autonomous driving investments gradually turned into accumulated expertise in designing dedicated AI chips, processing data locally, and building high-performance computing architectures capable of running advanced models with high efficiency.

For this reason, tech circles today view the canceled car project as more than just a failed attempt to launch a new vehicle. Although it did not reach the market, the huge investments poured into it have become a fundamental part of the technical foundation on which Apple's current steps in the AI processor market are based.