The race to AI will be won by hardware. Apple right now will lose to Google and Amazon without some serious help and market advantage. Sure google can build a fab or rent one out, but the army of engineers employed at either and the scores of patents would put Apple miles ahead.
It’d also give them a the back door they need into the enterprise market. Sort of how they won the consumer market back from Microsoft with the move to mobile. They’d have an AI hardware platform available for enterprise... A-nX ARM chips and insanely good graphics cards powering servers. see ya later, Intel...