This beats other hosted approaches, as the service remains business-unique, protected by Mac security, and boosted by the lower energy costs Macs require. In other words, the combined solution should help businesses maintain their own data privacy and security policies by being hosted on a highly secure set of platforms. This isn’t for every company, of course — many will want to create their own Mac-based clusters. But the service does mean that companies of any size can now reasonably deploy and manage a bank of Macs to support their business with AI.

Et tu, Apple?

To my mind it also hints at a highly plausible future for Apple’s own server-based solution, Private Cloud Compute. It’s a reasonable next step to imagine Apple’s protected solutions offering up AI-as-a-service to enterprise customers, all protected by a low-energy, high-security promise. Even if Apple never does commence competing in the hosted cloud infra space, you now have the alliance between MacStadium and webAI.

“This collaboration with webAI represents a significant milestone in the evolution of AI for the enterprise,” MacStadium CEO Ken Tacelli said in a statement. “By combining our macOS cloud expertise with webAI’s interconnected model approach, we’re creating a platform that will fundamentally change how organizations develop and deploy advanced AI systems on Apple silicon.”