I believe that Apple internally has plans to compete with AWS and Google Cloud in the long term, but with M1 chips. There have been rumors[0][1] about this, and it's a logical step.
Not a far leap to speculate that Microsoft/GitHub has been granted early access to that program.
Apple has needs for serving 1+ Billion of its customers. IS&T has been known to be a complete pile of crap ( plenty of evidence on HN alone ). A dozens of hiring seems more to me like trying to fix things rather than compete. The will need hundreds if not thousands as bare minimum.
They have been pitting Azure against AWS and GCP against Azure to gain extremely favourable terms.
They're already doing it somewhat with Xcode Cloud, which does remote builds in Apple's infrastructure[1]. They might not directly compete with AWS, Azure or GCP in products one to one, but it's not unreasonable to assume they will expand their cloud offerings in this space over time.
They run much of their cloud on AWS and Azure and Google today. You can see that in their reports.
I don’t know that Apple will be able to make enough server-grade ARM-based chips or server class hardware using their chips, to be able to make a real impact on AWS and Google and Azure. They have never really understood the server market anyway.
I do think they will be able to roll out more of their own data centers for doing some of their most sensitive data processing, and more of the stuff that they consider to be core to their business, in kind of a hybrid/hybrid cloud model, but I think they’re always going to have most of their cloud actually hosted on AWS, Google, Azure, and other cloud providers.
Apple has needs for serving 1+ Billion of its customers. IS&T has been known to be a complete pile of crap ( plenty of evidence on HN alone ). A dozens of hiring seems more to me like trying to fix things rather than compete. The will need hundreds if not thousands as bare minimum.
They have been pitting Azure against AWS and GCP against Azure to gain extremely favourable terms.