> Why should Apple have done this?

For money, probably.

Apple is presumably leaving a lot of money on the table by not trying to sell Apple Silicon for AI inference and training. They're the only ones who can attach reasonably large GPUs (M3 Ultra) to very large amounts of cheaper memory (512GB SO-DIMM per GPU). Apple could e.g. sell server SKUs of Mac Studios, heck they can sell M3 Ultra chips on PCIe cards. And they could further develop Apple Silicon in that direction. Presumably they would be seen as a very legit competitor to Nvidia that way, perhaps moreso than Intel and AMD. I'd assume that in the current climate this would be extremely lucrative.

Now, actually doing this would disrupt Apple's own supply chain as well as force it to spend significant internal resources and cultural change for this kind of product line. There's a good argument to be made it would disproportionally negatively affect its Mac business, so this would be a very risky move.

But given that AI hardware is likely much higher margin than the Mac business an argument could probably (sadly) be made that it'd be lucrative for them to try it. I personally don't think Apple is inclined to take this kind of risk to jeopardize the Mac, but I'm sure some people at Apple have considered this.