According to people familiar with the matter, Apple and Intel have reached a preliminary agreement, and Intel will OEM the chips used in some Apple devices. The two companies have been in intensive negotiations for more than a year and finalized a formal agreement in recent months, people familiar with the matter said. It's unclear what types of products Intel will manufacture chips for Apple. Apple ships more than 200 million iPhones every year, as well as millions of iPads and Mac computers.
Spokespersons for Apple and Intel declined to comment.
Intel has two main business segments: chip design business, and its wafer foundry department provides manufacturing foundry services for both its own chips and external customer chips. These two businesses continued to perform sluggishly for years until Chen Liwu became CEO last spring and vowed to revive the company's core business.
Last summer, the Trump administration reached an agreement to convert nearly $9 billion in federal subsidies into Intel stock. The U.S. government thus held a 10% stake in the chip manufacturer, which also played a key role in promoting cooperation between Apple and Intel.
Multiple people familiar with the matter revealed that in the past year, U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick met with Apple CEO Tim Cook and other executives many times, and also communicated with SpaceX founder Elon Musk and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, trying to promote cooperation with Intel. With Apple finalizing its cooperation, Intel has now established cooperative relationships with all three giants: Apple, Nvidia, and Musk's companies.
In the past ten years, due to factors such as successive mistakes in its technical roadmap, frequent management changes, and failed mergers and acquisitions integration, Intel has been significantly left behind by competitors such as TSMC and Samsung Electronics, and external foundry customers have reduced or withdrawn orders.
In March 2025, Intel hired Chen Liwu to replace ousted CEO Pat Gelsinger. Trump at one point called for his removal.
However, Chen Liwu won Trump’s recognition through a series of public relations communications, and shortly thereafter the U.S. government announced a 10% stake in Intel. After the news of the stake was announced, Intel's stock price soared; U.S. stocks rose 7.5% in early trading on Friday, hitting a record high of nearly $118 per share.
Intel’s CEO also replaced the head of the product department, hired new executives to take charge of the data center processor and client computing business, and took the lead in establishing a new custom chip business unit. In addition, the company has also increased heavy investment in the most advanced 14A process manufacturing production line.
Informed sources said that President Trump personally intervened at the White House to promote Cook and Intel to reach a cooperation.
Trump said in January this year: “I am optimistic about Intel.” He said that the U.S. government has made tens of billions of dollars in profit from this Intel investment, and the government’s endorsement has also attracted important partners for Intel.
Trump said: "As soon as we entered the game, Apple followed up and cooperated. Nvidia also joined in, and many industry elite companies chose to join hands with Intel."
Apple's move will help return chip manufacturing capacity to the United States.
Nvidia, the world's largest chip company, invested US$5 billion in Intel in September last year. The two parties reached a cooperation, with Intel manufacturing customized data center CPU processors for Nvidia. Last month, Elon Musk and Intel announced ambitious plans to build a chip manufacturing plant in Texas as part of Musk's Terafab super factory project to produce chips for Tesla, xAI and SpaceX.
Apple still relies on TSMC to manufacture its self-developed chips for iPhone, iPad, Mac and other devices, and it is also facing pressure to find more backup chip suppliers. In the last two earnings calls, Cook blamed the iPhone's inability to meet market demand on insufficient advanced chip production capacity.
Cook said that the tight chip production capacity is expected to continue into this quarter, and many Mac models will also be affected. "Looking ahead to the market outlook, it may take several months for the Mac mini and Mac Studio models to achieve a balance between supply and demand." Last Friday, the day after the earnings call, Apple had raised the starting price of the Mac mini.
Overall, TSMC’s process foundry capabilities far exceed those of Samsung and Intel; and competition among memory and storage chip manufacturers is more intense, allowing Apple to have diversified supply channels.
Apple has long been TSMC’s largest customer, but now Nvidia and other AI chip design companies have surged in demand for TSMC’s production capacity, resulting in Apple’s bargaining power in striving for stable foundry production capacity declining. Since 2006, Apple personal computers have long used CPUs designed by Intel as the main processor. In 2020, they switched to self-developed custom chips based on the Arm architecture.
In an interview in February this year, when asked whether Apple was moving forward with Intel's foundry of chips, Apple's head of global procurement David Tom responded: "We are always in communication with Intel." But he refused to disclose specific details of the negotiations.