Apple unveiled a new cloud intelligence system at its annual Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) on Monday (June 10), specifically designed for private AI processing.

Dubbed Private Cloud Compute (PCC), Apple said the offering is a compute node that uses “custom-built server hardware that brings the power and security of Apple silicon to the data center,” allowing the company to deploy AI compute at scale.

In a blog post discussing PCC, Apple said the new operating system is a “hardened subset” of the underlying foundations that make up iOS and macOS, tailor-made to support LLM inferencing workloads.

On top of this, the company has built a “custom set of cloud extensions,” but has excluded components that are “traditionally critical to data center administration,” such as remote shells, system introspection, and observability tools.

Further information was not disclosed about either the custom-built silicon or the operating system.

Apple said that the solution works by having a user’s device sending data to PCC for the exclusive purpose of fulfilling an inferencing request. The company claims that PCC only uses the data to perform the operations requested by the user, and that all user data stays on the PCC nodes until the response is returned.

PCC deletes user data after fulfilling the request, no user data is retained after the response is returned, and user data is never available to Apple, the company said. The solution contains the same hardware security technologies used in iPhones, including Secure Enclave and Secure Boot.

Last month it was reported that Apple was allegedly working with TSMC to develop its own chips to run artificial intelligence (AI) software in its data centers.

Codenamed Project ACDC – which stands for Apple Chips in Data Centers – the chips have supposedly been in development for several years, with sources cited in the original report from the Wall Street Journal claiming they would likely be used for inferencing.

That same month, Apple launched its new iPad Pro containing the latest version of the company’s 3nm system on a chip (SoC) offering.

In April, DCD exclusively reported that Apple hired former Google, IBM, and Nvidia executive Sumit Gupta as director of products for Apple Cloud. At Google, Gupta said he was responsible for the company’s data center infrastructure products, including TPUs, Arm CPUs, storage, and networking.