Nestled in Bloomberg’s reporting earlier on Apple’s plans to revamp Siri as a chatbot with iOS 27, was an interesting tidbit on a possible change in the company’s cloud strategy. Specifically, Mark Gurman says Apple and Google are discussing running the next-generation Siri models directly on Google’s servers, not Apple’s.
With iOS 26.4, Apple is set to launch the first new LLM Siri features, using models running in Private Cloud Compute based on an older generation of Gemini. But the Siri chatbot coming in the iOS 27 cycle will apparently be based off the newer, smarter, Gemini 3 models. Running these latest-gen models seemingly requires higher performance servers than what Apple can deliver right now through its own Private Compute cloud infrastructure …
As such, Apple user conversations with the new Siri chatbot experience would be trafficked through Google’s (much larger) cloud infrastructure for every request.
That would represent a big departure philosophically for Apple, which talked up Private Cloud Compute as a way to extend the privacy bubble of the personal data on your iPhone into Apple’s cloud. However, the Private Cloud Compute idea was designed under a prior regime. When Apple was promoting Private Cloud Compute at WWDC 2024, it had not conceived needing to license Gemini models from Google at all.
As such, it’s not unthinkable that other elements of its AI plan may be in flux. While Apple would probably like to keep as much of its processing running on its cloud, rather than a third-party, the new heads of Siri — Craig Federighi and former Vision Pro exec Mike Rockwell — seem to be choosing practicality over idealism. There is clearly pressure to ‘catch up’ and deliver modern Siri features to users as soon as possible, even if that means reneging on some parts of their prior published vision.
After all, the company was also previously downplaying the premise of a chatbot experience altogether, but plans change and Apple is clearly responding to the proven market success of services like ChatGPT. It’s also probably safe to assume that Apple would negotiate the Google cloud server arrangement such that sensitive user data is not logged or retained by Google, sufficiently siloed from Google’s advertising and data collection units.
Behind the scenes, parts of iCloud have depended on providers like Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform since its inception. These third-party data storage partners enable features like iCloud Photos to operate and scale, all the while Apple holds the encryption keys. Back in 2021, it was reported that Google’s cloud hosted an enormous 8 exabytes of iCloud content.
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