President Donald Trump announced yesterday a deal between Apple and Intel for the design and production of microchips in the United States. No details were provided about the type of semiconductors involved in the collaboration, nor about volumes or economic value.
Although the available information is scarce, it is still possible to say that the agreement will likely make an important contribution to the revival of Intel’s manufacturing division after a period of internal crisis that prevented the company from evolving its production technologies or riding the wave of artificial intelligence, which instead has made other chipmakers successful.
INTEL’S RECOVERY, IN DEALS AND ON THE STOCK MARKET
Intel’s recovery – which since March 2025 has a new CEO, Lip-Bu Tan – is evident. Last week the company received a large order of processors from Google and in April closed a supply agreement with automaker Tesla related to the new 14A manufacturing process. Since the beginning of the year, the stock has risen by over 169 percent: on Thursday, after Trump’s announcement, it gained 13 percent reaching $133.9, a record.
WHAT APPLE WILL DO WITH INTEL
A contract with Apple – one of the largest consumer electronics companies in the world – will not only benefit Intel’s financial results but also its reputation, potentially allowing it to attract new major clients. Furthermore, the company has received investments from the United States government ($9 billion and a 10 percent stake), the Japanese holding SoftBank ($2 billion), and Nvidia ($5 billion), the dominant company in the AI processor market.
The relationship between Apple and Intel is not new: from 2006 to 2020, Intel supplied processors for Apple’s Mac computers; after that, Apple started designing them in-house – the so-called systems-on-a-chip – and outsourced manufacturing to the Taiwanese company Tsmc, the world’s largest contract chipmaker.
Re-establishing ties with Intel would therefore allow Apple to reduce its dependence on Tsmc and Taiwan, a potentially critical area because China does not consider Taiwan a separate country but a province of its territory, to be controlled even by force.
Apple is generally very attentive to supply security and the resilience of its supply chain from external shocks: for example, it tends to have at least two different suppliers for each of the main components of its devices, such as screens. On the other hand, it is objectively difficult to find suppliers able to match the Taiwanese company’s reliability in terms of technological quality and production scale. In this regard, Intel still has to prove that its microchip factories – foundries, in jargon – can compete with those of Tsmc.
APPLE BETWEEN GOVERNMENT RELATIONS, PRESSURED MARGINS, AND THE MEMORY CHIP CRISIS
Besides supply chain security issues, the deal with Intel is also useful for Apple to improve relations with the Trump administration, which – as mentioned – has become a shareholder of Intel and strongly insists on recovering US manufacturing capacity.
Currently, Apple is also under pressure regarding margins: in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, CEO Tim Cook announced a price increase for products due to rising costs for memory chips.
Memory chips – as the name suggests – are electronic devices that allow data to be stored and exchanged with the central processing unit, the component that manages all the main activities of a computer. Since these chips are essential for AI-dedicated systems, hyperscalers (companies like Amazon and Alphabet that provide digital services via cloud) are purchasing them in large quantities, reducing the available supply for other uses and driving prices up.
The shortage and price increase of memory chips are impacting the operations and accounts of electronic device manufacturers, video game console makers, and even automakers.
