Photos show 32 compute boards inside Apple's AI server

Photos posted August 24 show the inside of Apple's Private Cloud Compute server, per AppleInsider. The chassis holds four columns of eight compute boards each, with a heatsink down the middle of every column and one fan per column. Four columns of eight boards works out to 32 in a 2U enclosure.

Commenters examining the images argue the heatsink sizing points to base M5 chips rather than the higher-power M5 Ultra variant. AppleInsider's report doesn't confirm chip identity, and it gives no power figures for the chassis.

One detailed reply on the images adds that nothing in the chassis pools memory across boards. Each of the 32 nodes appears to run a full request inside its own memory, instead of splitting one model tensor-parallel across multiple boards. That's the opposite of how most large-scale AI infrastructure handles a model too big for one chip.

If that reading holds, it points to a bet on many independent nodes over one pooled-memory machine. Whatever fits in a single chip's memory is the ceiling per node, not the size of the whole 2U box.