Apple's Siri AI runs on Google servers, but promises to remain private

CUPERTINO, California—Apple announced earlier this year that its long-delayed Siri upgrade, announced this week as "Siri AI," would use Google's Gemini language models. What the company confirmed at its Worldwide Developers Conference yesterday was that it also ran on Nvidia hardware installed in Google servers. But the company is still making the same privacy promises it did before, when all of its AI models were either running locally on your devices or on Apple-controlled server hardware.

For years, Apple has touted user privacy as a key benefit of using its platforms. Its cloud services use encryption that's intended to keep other people—including Apple employees—from being able to gain access to it. And the company has long advertised its use of on-device processing for things like scanning images, keeping as much data as possible from leaving your device in the first place.

But with Apple Intelligence, Apple has run up against the limits of its own hardware. The kinds of language and reasoning models that can run locally on an iPhone or Mac are relatively small, limiting their capabilities and accuracy. Apple's Private Cloud Compute system was a partial solution but relied on Apple's own server hardware; to get the kind of capacity it would need to support Siri AI, Apple would have had to commit to a huge data center buildout that it has so far avoided.

Why this matters: The integration of Google's Gemini language models into Siri AI marks a significant shift in Apple's approach to AI, one that balances capability with the company's longstanding commitment to user privacy. For developers and businesses, this partnership highlights the growing importance of collaborations in the AI space, where companies are increasingly relying on each other's strengths to deliver more sophisticated services. For consumers, it means that Siri AI will likely become more useful and responsive, while still keeping their data private.

However, questions remain about the extent to which Apple can control data processed on Google's servers, and how this arrangement will evolve over time. As AI continues to advance, the challenge for companies like Apple will be to maintain their privacy commitments while also delivering the kind of AI experiences that consumers expect.