I think so, especially with the specialized hardware in there for machine learning (although in a data center you'd probably opt for specialized hardware like discrete GPUs). There are some players on the market for ARM servers as well.

That said, Apple won't make their chips available to the greater market. They might use variations of it in their own data centers, maybe.

> That said, Apple won't make their chips available to the greater market.

I wonder if this could potentially be a good time to bring back Xserve...

They definitely should. Even if the profit on the device wouldn't be decisive, but chip making is all about production numbers. Using the Apple Silicon first for all the Apple owned cloud servers and then offering them in Xserve units would be very profitable and could reduce the power draw of data warehouses a lot.

The question marks for me would be:

1) Is Apple interested (and capable) making macOS into a realistic choice for servers again?

2) If not, is Apple comfortable with selling a box that most people will put Linux on? Would they put resources into a Bootcamp-esque driver package?

The biggest question is: does Apple want to bring back the Xserver? If yes, there are several ways. If not, no good proposal will sway them :) But one thing was interesting during the AS announcement at WWDC. Federighi stressed how good a hypervisor macOS is. That was probably first of all a comment about virtualization on the new Macs, but could also allow to install any operation system as guest on a cloud server. Many cloud services are running inside VMs.

The only reason for that statement is to silence those who would raise a stink over the loss of Bootcamp.

"See, you don't need native Linux on the machine, just use our hypervisor & Docker/VMs"

Yes, that was the context of the statement. But it also would give an answer how customers would use an AS Xserve.

The market for Mac OS specific services would be vanishingly small; everybody else can just use Linux. Apple's not going to make a play for a commodity market.