How a Car That Never Saw the Road Forever Changed Apple Chips

There are projects that, despite sinking before seeing the light, leave a technological legacy capable of redefining the future of a company. This is what emerges from a recent reconstruction by Mark Gurman for Bloomberg, according to which the defunct Apple Car project effectively represented the laboratory in which the hardware infrastructure for Apple Intelligence was born.

The program, launched over a decade ago and officially archived in 2024, absorbed investments estimated at over $10 billion without ever producing a marketable vehicle. The stated goal was not simply to produce an electric car but to achieve Level 5 autonomous driving, the highest standard in which the vehicle operates without any human intervention. This milestone imposed an enormous engineering challenge on Apple: the real-time processing, and local on-device processing, of extremely heavy AI workloads.

To meet this need, Apple engineers massively invested in machine learning research and the development of silicon dedicated to artificial intelligence processing. The chip specifically designed for the car never reached the production phase, but the underlying research work was not lost: it instead transformed into the Neural Engine, the proprietary AI project that today equips practically every Apple chip on the market.

The first Neural Engine debuted in 2017 aboard the iPhone X, enabling features like Face ID and Animoji. Since then, Apple has progressively extended this component to its entire product range: every Mac with Apple Silicon launched from 2020 onwards integrates a dedicated Neural Engine, allowing AI operations to be executed directly on the device without the need to rely on the cloud.

The influence of the research conducted on Apple Car has also led to the creation of Ultra-class chips intended for professional Macs, as well as the customized processors that today power the servers dedicated to Apple Intelligence.

This data takes on particular significance when considering how, in recent years, Apple has struggled to keep pace with competitors like Google and Microsoft on the AI software front: while the Cupertino company lagged in terms of functionality, it quietly continued to build, for over a decade, the necessary hardware infrastructure to support them. Investments that may only now begin to bear fruit, at a time when Apple is expanding Apple Intelligence and redesigning Siri around more advanced AI models.