TL;DR: Apple's much-hyped car project was recently canceled after a decade of development and an investment exceeding a billion dollars. Due to the secrecy surrounding the vehicle, details remain scarce. However, a new report suggests that the car could have been equipped with an extremely powerful custom chip, equivalent to four M2 Ultras combined.

The information comes from Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, who reports that the chip was being developed by the Apple Silicon team, who designs the processors for the company's iPhones and MacBooks. Gurman referred to the new chip as the car's "AI brain," noting that its development was nearly complete before Apple abruptly canceled its automotive ambitions.

The exact specifications of the chip remain a mystery, but to provide some perspective, a single M2 Ultra chip contains 134 billion transistors. It features up to a 24-core CPU, a 76-core GPU, and a dedicated 32-core neural engine. This chip powers the latest MacBook Pro laptops and the Mac Studio desktop, ranking them among the fastest client computers in their respective categories.

Now that the Apple Car project is said to be dead in the water, it remains to be seen if the company will repurpose the new chip to power other devices or use technology from it for future projects.

Codenamed "Project Titan," Apple's super-secretive and highly ambitious car project is believed to have kicked off in 2014 under the leadership of CEO Tim Cook. Over the past decade, the company was said to have experimented with various ideas for the vehicle before eventually pulling down the curtains amid policy indecision over whether to make a standard all-electric Tesla competitor or a fully autonomous vehicle with state-of-the-art self-driving technology.

What a prototype Apple Car really looked like, according to leaks.

When Project Titan was still alive, Apple reportedly negotiated with various traditional automakers, including Mercedes-Benz, Ford, Volkswagen, McLaren, and Tesla, to build its high-tech car. While none of them publicly spoke about those negotiations, the one company that did confirm its talks with Apple was Hyundai.

In January 2021, the South Korean automaker confirmed that it was holding discussions with the American tech giant about possibly manufacturing the latter's autonomous electric car. However, nothing came of that as Hyundai executives were reportedly worried about a culture clash with the American company.