By PCMAG
Publication Date: 2025-11-22 21:00:00
Apple isn’t interested in letting rivals like Nvidia get a leg up in the AI race. To stay competitive, it’s enabled its existing Thunderbolt 5-supporting Macs to connect together as more advanced “AI clusters” for tandem AI model processing, similar to Nvidia’s recently released DGX products.
Apple’s Answer to Nvidia DGX? The Mac, Of Course
This isn’t uncharted territory for Apple, but it’s a first using Thunderbolt 5. The capability will arrive with macOS 26.2, which is currently in beta, and use Apple’s open-source AI array framework known as MLX. It’s essentially an application programming interface (API) that lets developers create or test new AI models and iterate on them with new features and capabilities.
Apple didn’t make this happen alone; it collaborated with developer Exo Labs to create the tandem AI processing capability using the MLX API. The tool is known as EXO 1.0, and it can facilitate up to four Thunderbolt 5 Mac Studio desktops or two MacBook Pro laptops working on the same AI models, which can be much larger than they could handle alone: up to 1 trillion parameters. The Thunderbolt 5 connections enable the systems to operate as one, pooling their unified memory into a single resource for the AI models to tap.
(Credit: Brian Westover/PCMag)
In a recent web demonstration, members of Apple’s product team showed us four M3 Ultra-equipped Mac Studio desktops pooling their resources together to run a 1-trillion parameter model known…
