Apple has chosen to use chips designed by Google rather than those from industry leader Nvidia for key components of its AI software infrastructure, as revealed in a research paper published on Monday.

This decision is significant given Nvidia's dominance in the AI processor market, where it holds an 80 percent share. Apple utilized two types of Google's tensor processing units (TPUs) to train its AI models, deploying 2,048 TPUv5p chips for devices like iPhones and 8,192 TPUv4 processors for server-side models.

Unlike Nvidia, which focuses on graphics processing units (GPUs), Google offers access to TPUs through its Google Cloud Platform, requiring customers to use its cloud services to benefit from the hardware. The full extent of Apple's reliance on Google hardware was not disclosed until the recent publication.

Both Google and Nvidia declined to comment on the matter.

Apple's engineers noted in the paper that Google's chips could potentially support the development of even more advanced AI models in the future.

(With input from Reuters)