The news that Apple had agreed to make its chips in the United States did not come from Apple. It came, on Thursday, from a post by President Donald Trump on Truth Social, announcing that the company had agreed to work with Intel to design and manufacture chips on American soil. Apple, for its part, said nothing.
That asymmetry is the most telling thing about the announcement. A commercial arrangement between the world’s most valuable company and a chipmaker the federal government partly owns was disclosed by the President rather than by either firm.
Neither Apple nor Intel had confirmed the specifics by the time Trump’s post went up, and the post itself was light on them: no volumes, no timeline, no which-chips, no dollar figure.
What is on the record is the trajectory that led here. Intel and Apple have been talking for more than a year. In May, the Wall Street Journal reported that the two had reached a preliminary deal for Intel to make some chips for Apple, the product of long and intermittent discussions. Trump’s post reads less like a fresh development than a public claiming of one, timed to the administration’s own interests.
Those interests are considerable. Last year the Trump administration took a roughly 10 per cent stake in Intel and committed to investing about $10bn in the company to build and expand domestic factories, turning Washington into both Intel’s shareholder and its most vocal salesman.
