OpenAI buys tens of thousands of Mac minis for AI agent training

openai and rival ai labs, including anthropic, are purchasing large quantities of mac minis and mac studios to train computer-use agents that autonomously handle multi-step tasks. the hardware is suitable for long-running ai workloads due to its strong chips, shared memory, and solid cooling. openai is seeking more devices, but the most powerful models have been sold out for months due to a memory chip shortage. this trend has contributed to a 29% jump in apple's mac revenue to $10.4 billion in the june quarter. the open-source software exo allows users to link multiple macs into a cluster to run large models locally.