By Sam Boughedda
Morgan Stanley analysts said in a research note Friday that Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) is one of the companies they believe could benefit from the AI shift, but the "P&L impact is still in its early days."
They believe Apple is "well-positioned to benefit from the rise of AI workloads being pushed to the edge due to leadership with its A-series and M-series chips."
"Apple has used its in-house silicon development to optimize the integration of hardware, software, and services, rolling out more powerful and efficient chips each year," wrote the analysts.
They explained that back in 2017, Apple released the first generation of its Apple Neural Engine as part of the iPhone X's A11 chipset, which helped to power on-device ML features like FaceID and Memoji.
They added that since then, "Apple has expanded this to the iPad/Mac and taken other steps forward, including optimizing Stable Diffusion (text-to-image model) to run on the Apple Neural Engine, which allows users to generate content on-device more quickly."
As a result, Morgan Stanley believes the prior investments "could position Apple uniquely as a hardware leader as AI interest increases and consumers run more AI-intensive applications on smartphones."