OpenAI buys thousands of Mac minis to train AI agents, turning Apple's Macs into training infrastructure

OpenAI is turning Apple's desktop line into a training ground for its AI agents. According to a report from The Information cited by India Today, OpenAI has purchased tens of thousands of Mac mini and Mac Studio systems, and is still trying to secure more, while Anthropic is renting Mac minis through Amazon Web Services for similar work.

The move lands as OpenAI pushes into custom chips and memory, and now adds Apple's desktop hardware to its compute mix. The Macs are being used for reinforcement learning, where AI learns through trial and error, and for training computer-use agents that navigate software interfaces, carry out multi-step workflows and interact with computers in a human-like way.

Apple recently refreshed both machines: the Mac mini now comes with the M6 chip, while the Mac Studio offers M5 Max or M5 Ultra chips. The devices have become popular for running AI models locally, but the new reporting shows top AI labs are also using them for training workloads.

The trend reflects developers turning to Macs for specialized AI workloads instead of relying only on large Nvidia GPU clusters. Apple's Unified Memory Architecture and thermal design let the Mac mini and Mac Studio run multiple local sessions and large models on a single system, without the latency and cost overhead of GPU clusters.

The surge is showing up in Apple's financials: Mac revenue rose nearly 29 per cent year on year to $10.3 billion in the latest quarter, making it Apple's fastest-growing hardware line. It also appears to have pushed Apple into an unusually early refresh — the M6 Mac mini and the new Mac Studio chips were announced in late August rather than the typical autumn window.

Even so, the enterprise rush caught Apple off guard. The report said Apple lacked a dedicated engineering team for business customers, staff focused on developer relations, and an enterprise AI strategy. With a global memory shortage under way, many high-end Mac mini and Mac Studio configurations have been out of stock for months.

The report also framed Apple as a growing threat to Nvidia in local AI, with Nvidia responding through the DGX Spark. The next question is whether Apple will formalize an enterprise AI strategy — and whether OpenAI's buying spree keeps high-end Macs scarce.