Apple has approved a third party driver that allows NVIDIA external GPUs to work with Arm based Macs, marking a shift in a system where such support remained absent for years.
The driver, developed by AI startup Tiny Corp, enables NVIDIA GPUs to run on Apple Silicon devices through external GPU setups. Apple has signed the driver, which means users no longer need to disable system protections to install it.
The setup remains technical. Users still need to compile the driver using tools such as Docker, and the current implementation targets AI workloads rather than general graphics use.
Apple’s move stands out because the company tightly controls GPU support on macOS. Historically, Apple has integrated drivers directly into the operating system and limited compatibility to supported hardware, mainly AMD GPUs.
Support for external GPUs also dropped with the shift to Apple Silicon. Earlier Intel based Macs supported eGPUs through Thunderbolt, but Arm based Macs did not offer the same capability, leaving developers to build unofficial solutions.
Tiny Corp’s driver builds on earlier work where developers managed to connect NVIDIA’s GPUs to Apple Silicon devices using USB4 and Thunderbolt. Those setups required disabling system protections and were limited to specific use cases such as running AI models.
The new approval removes one of the main barriers by allowing the driver to run within Apple’s security framework. However, the feature does not yet provide full plug and play support or display output for typical consumer use.
The development signals a shift in how Apple handles external hardware on its Arm platform. It opens a path for developers who rely on NVIDIA GPUs for machine learning workloads, where Apple’s built in graphics do not match specialized hardware.
For now, the solution remains limited to advanced users, but Apple’s approval indicates a gradual change in a platform that has remained closed to third party GPU support since the transition to Apple Silicon.
