AI Daily: Apple’s AI launch in China delayed amid U.S.-China tensions

Catch up on the top artificial intelligence news and commentary by Wall Street analysts on publicly traded companies in the space with this daily recap compiled by The Fly:

CHINA AI LAUNCH DELAYED: Apple’s (AAPL) plan to launch its AI service, Apple Intelligence, in China with Alibaba (BABA) is being delayed by China’s Cyberspace Administration, The Financial Times’ Zijing Wu, Cheng Leng, and Michael Acton report. Despite submitting multiple joint AI products for approval, the rollout is stalled due to rising geopolitical tensions stemming from the U.S.-China trade conflict, originally intensified under U.S. President Donald Trump, citing two people familiar with the matter.

AI INFRASTRUCTURE: Amazon (AMZN) announced plans to invest an estimated $10b in North Carolina to expand its data center infrastructure to support AI and cloud computing technologies. “This landmark investment is expected to create at least 500 new high-skilled jobs while supporting thousands of other jobs in the Amazon Web Services data center supply chain. Generative AI is driving increased demand for advanced cloud infrastructure and compute power, and our investment will support the future of AI from AWS data centers in the Tar Heel State. This deployment of cutting-edge cloud computing infrastructure will strengthen North Carolina’s position as an innovation hub,” the company said in a statement.

PAYING BUSINESS USERS: Microsoft (MSFT)-backed OpenAI’s Chief Operating Officer Brad Lightcap told CNBC in an interview that the company now has 3M paying business users, up from the 2M it reported in February. The 3M users include ChatGPT Enterprise, ChatGPT Team and ChatGPT Edu customers, Microsoft-partnered OpenAI said. “There’s this really tight interconnect between the growth of ChatGPT as a consumer tool and its adoption in the enterprise and in businesses,” Lightcap is quoted by CNBC as having said. OpenAI expects revenue of $12.7B this year, a source confirmed to CNBC, according to Ashley Capoot.

MLPERF RESULTS: CoreWeave (CRWV), in collaboration with Nvidia (NVDA) and IBM (IBM), announced that it delivered the largest-ever MLPerf Training v5.0 submission on Nvidia Blackwell, using 2,496 NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs running on CoreWeave’s AI-optimized cloud platform. “This submission is the largest NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 cluster ever benchmarked under MLPerf, 34x larger than the only other submission from a cloud provider highlighting the large scale and readiness of CoreWeave’s cloud platform for today’s demanding AI workloads,” the company stated. “AI labs and enterprises choose CoreWeave because we deliver a purpose-built cloud platform with the scale, performance, and reliability that their workloads demand. These MLPerf results reinforce our leadership in supporting today’s most demanding AI workloads,” added Peter Salanki, Chief Technology Officer and Co-founder at CoreWeave.

SUPPORT FOR AI STARTUPS: Accenture (ACN) announced expanded support for high-potential AI startups with a new engagement initiative, established through Accenture Ventures with support from Nvidia Inception. This collaboration is designed to accelerate startup growth and innovation by closing a common gap many early-stage companies face-moving from breakthrough ideas to scalable enterprise solutions.