Apple's Dead Self-Driving Car Is Quietly Powering Its AI Chip Overhaul

Apple is rewriting the roadmap for the chips inside its Macs, and the driving force is artificial intelligence.

According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, whose reporting anchors coverage from Techmeme, Firstpost and Crypto Briefing, Apple's upcoming M6, M7 and M8 processors reflect how deeply AI is reshaping the company's hardware plans. Gurman reports that Apple is already "taping out" — an industry term for finalizing a chip design before manufacturing — an M7 with major upgrades to its NPU, the neural processing unit that handles AI tasks on the device itself.

The plans reportedly go further. Gurman says Apple is developing an M7 Ultra with a striking 1.5TB of RAM, along with an M8 chip slated for 2028. Firstpost, summarizing Gurman's reporting, adds that Apple could skip the M6 Pro and M6 Max entirely and jump straight to an AI-focused M7 lineup. New Apple Pencils and a new iPad Pro are also said to be coming.

There's an unexpected backstory. The Verge reports that Apple's canceled self-driving car program — which never truly got off the ground — may be responsible for making its chips such strong AI performers. Early in developing the car platform, The Verge writes, Apple realized it would need powerful on-device AI processing. That work, including a car processor, appears to have seeded the AI muscle now showing up across Apple's silicon.

Why it matters: on-device AI is becoming the battleground for phones, tablets and laptops, and Apple's decision to rebuild its chip roadmap around it signals that the next generation of Apple hardware will be defined less by raw speed than by how much artificial intelligence it can run without ever touching the cloud.