Under the new agreement, the companies will partner on chips that will reportedly be used for ‘multiple generations of Apple products’.

Semiconductor and infrastructure manufacturer Broadcom has extended its partnership with tech giant Apple, in a deal that will see both organisations collaborate on custom-made chips through to 2031.

According to Bloomberg, as part of the new arrangement, Broadcom and Apple will work on application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) silicon. Going forward, these types of chips will be found in “multiple generations of Apple products”, according to a Broadcom filing. 

ASIC chips are becoming increasingly useful in the development of components for processing artificial intelligence-related tasks and Apple is said to be working on more advanced AI servers set to deploy as early as 2027. 

Broadcom has been part of a partnership with Apple for years, providing the organisation with key components such as the radio frequency chips that are used in iPhones for connecting to cellular ​networks, as well as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity chips and other networking semiconductors. 

In recent years, rumours circulated about Apple ditching Broadcom’s Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity chips to focus primarily on its own N1 chip, which is a combined Wi-Fi and Bluetooth component found in modern iPhones, iPads and Macs.

Apple is also currently working on AI server chips, named Baltra, which are larger versions of the M5 Ultra chip the organisation is set to debut later this year. The future AI servers aim to be more powerful, capable and reliable.

With the AI boom resulting in the significantly increased demand for chips, companies have found themselves struggling to secure resource pipelines and Apple have had to up the price of several of their products, as reported in June of this year. Increases were shown to be as little as €40 for the HomePod Mini, to nearly €1,000 for the Mac Studio M3 Ultra. 

Earlier in the year, AI giant Anthropic announced an expanded agreement that would allow the company to tap 3.5GW of Google’s tensor processing unit (TPU) capacity from Broadcom.

Similar to other companies, it was also recently reported that Anthropic is seriously considering manufacturing its own chips, as a means of securing the supply chain and outpacing rivals. Though not confirmed, it has been reported that the company is currently in talks with Samsung regarding the development of custom-made AI chips. 

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