Apple is running its most powerful AI on Google’s cloud: Here’s what that means for your privacy
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For years, Apple has made sure that you knew that your data belongs to you. Be it on the device or on the cloud – whatever they do with it, they keep it safe and within your control. It is the core principle of their brand, and something that has become almost an identity trait over the years. That is until WWDC 2026 came around.
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Somehow, somewhere during the Liquid Glass keynote, Apple announced what it would have seemed impossible to happen a couple of years ago – their most sophisticated AI model is running on the servers of Google with Nvidia’s hardware. The same Apple that built such a solid privacy story that it was a marketers’ dream – “What happens on your iPhone, stays on your iPhone” – has finally turned to its arch-rival’s cloud computing platform to host its most compute-intensive AI tasks.
To be fair, Apple isn’t being deceptive about it. The company’s own security blog describes the Google Cloud expansion as “extending our industry-leading PCC privacy commitments to third-party data centres for the first time.” The key phrase there is for the first time. Apple said it itself. This is new territory.
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This aspect of the argument by Apple seems perfectly reasonable. The measures of privacy taken on behalf of Private Cloud Compute include encryption of data in transit, absence of persistence, and cryptographic authentication of all nodes. Nvidia, on its part, uses the confidential computing functionality that ensures encryption during processing operations. Control over all cryptographic actions remains with Apple. In addition, the binaries can be analyzed by security specialists. The architecture, apparently, does not really mind what data centre they are deployed to.
But there is a fundamental difference between an architecture and trust.
The Apple’s brand related to privacy has never been a simple technical specification. It was always a promise regarding who is going to have access to your data – as few people as possible, ideally none besides Apple itself. Once you start adding components provided by Google, Nvidia, and Intel into the picture, this promise becomes a bit blurred.
What became clear through WWDC 2026, however, is that Apple has reached its limit. Despite the capabilities of its custom hardware, Apple has had to resort to the only infrastructure capable of running such advanced AI technology as new Siri – which happens to belong to Google.
The privacy protections may hold. But the story Apple told about why you should trust it just got a few more authors.
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