U.S. President Trump recently posted on the social platform Truth Social that Apple has agreed to cooperate with Intel to design and manufacture its chips in the United States as part of its strategy to promote the return of the semiconductor industry to the United States. In the post, he criticized previous "stupid presidents" for allowing Taiwan and other places to "steal" U.S. semiconductor factories, and emphasized that the United States "leads everything in design, but must immediately complete manufacturing locally."
Trump said that after he won his "second term (he called it his 'third' in the article)", he decided to support Intel to rebuild the chip design and manufacturing capabilities in the United States. He claimed that the government first "helped introduce Nvidia", which agreed to produce some of its high-end chips at Intel; subsequently, Musk also agreed to cooperate with Intel's technical team to build TerraFab, known as "the world's largest chip factory"; and the latest step is that Apple agreed to cooperate with Intel to design and produce its chips in the United States.
According to Trump, the U.S. government exchanged nearly $9 billion in federal funds for about 10% of Intel's equity. Intel's market value at the time was about $100 billion, but now it has risen to more than $600 billion, and the U.S. government's shares have a market value of more than $60 billion. Trump used this to ask, "When was the last time a president made the United States money?" and packaged this series of cooperation as a major achievement in industrial policy during his term.
More than a month before Trump issued his message, foreign media had reported that Apple and Intel had been negotiating for more than a year on chip foundry cooperation, and had evolved from preliminary contacts to a more formal arrangement. For Apple, its reliance on TSMC's advanced process capacity is increasingly under pressure: amid the artificial intelligence boom, AI chip manufacturers such as Nvidia and AMD are fiercely competing for the most advanced manufacturing capacity. If it can establish foundry cooperation with Intel, it will help Apple expand its chip production capacity channels, promote supply chain diversification, and reduce its reliance on a single generation of factories.
At present, neither Apple nor Intel has officially responded to the relevant news outside normal working hours, so the relevant cooperation still remains at the level of Trump's unilateral public statement. There are still many questions about key details such as the specific timetable, scale, process nodes used, yield performance, and which specific chip components Intel will OEM for Apple.
If this potential cooperation finally comes to fruition, it will be a major victory for Intel's foundry business. In the past few years, Intel has been trying to reshape its image as an advanced process manufacturer through businesses such as "Intel Foundry Services" and actively seek more large external customers. Even if it only wins some of Apple's chip orders, it will significantly boost its efforts to return to the top wafer foundry camp.
It is worth noting that Apple has been fading away from its reliance on Intel's self-developed processors for more than a decade: Since the launch of its self-developed Arm architecture M series chips in 2020, Mac computers have gradually completed the architectural migration from Intel platforms. But this time, if the cooperation comes true, Intel will no longer play a chip architecture and design role, but a pure foundry role - providing manufacturing services for Apple's self-designed chips.
Local manufacturing of semiconductors is a key part of Trump's economic agenda during his second term, and Apple has frequently been involved in this policy direction. In early 2025, under pressure from the Trump administration to impose tariffs on Chinese products and brewing new tariffs on imported semiconductors, Apple announced it would invest $500 billion in the United States over the next few years, and later added a new round of U.S. investment plans of $100 billion. During this period, Trump repeatedly criticized Apple for locating iPhone assembly and other production processes overseas.
However, this series of trends does not mean that the "American-made iPhone" will become a reality in the short term. Analysis pointed out that it is extremely difficult to completely move the final assembly process back to the United States in terms of supply chain, cost and cycle. In contrast, it is more feasible to move some chip manufacturing to the United States: If Intel can provide sufficiently stable and advanced chip production capacity in the United States, Apple will gain more room for maneuver in the current tight chip market.
From a larger perspective, Trump's post on Truth Social is not only a concentrated "performance display" of his industrial policy, but also a form of public opinion pressure and interest binding on Apple, Intel and the entire US semiconductor industry. It remains to be seen whether and to what extent Apple will shift its production focus toward the United States amid the backdrop of geopolitics and global supply chain reorganization.