Apple has just announced what it called its largest-ever spend commitment and means the company will invest more than $500 billion over the next four years.
“This new pledge builds on Apple’s long history of investing in American innovation and advanced high-skilled manufacturing, and will support a wide range of initiatives that focus on artificial intelligence, silicon engineering, and skills development for students and workers across the country,” the company said.
That’s an enormous amount, obviously, even for a company as big as Apple. A lot of it had been pledged already, and the total tally may have been reiterated in order to appeal to President Trump. It’s hardly a coincidence, surely, that the four-year span exactly tallies with the current President’s tenure.
That said, there’s a lot here. The U.S. Advanced Manufacturing Fund, which Apple says supports world-class innovation and high-skilled manufacturing jobs, is being double from $5 billion to $10 billion. This fund is “focused on promoting advanced manufacturing and skills development throughout the country,” Apple says.
This expansion includes a commitment to produce silicon in Arizona at Fab21, a facility run by TSMC.
There are more jobs, with Apple committing to hiring more than 20,000 people over the next four years.
Some of those will be in Houston, Texas, as part of the move to produce servers in a 250,000-square-foot manufacture facility, due to open next year. The servers will be key to Apple Intelligence and previously were manufactured outside the States.
There will also be more data center capacity in five other states: North Carolina, Iowa, Oregon, Arizona, and Nevada.
Apple has also committed to growing research and development across the United States, and Apple name-checked the latest fruit of these endeavors: the Apple C1 cellular modem which debuts in the iPhone 16e on Friday, Feb. 28.
It says this modem is just the beginning: “Apple C1 is the start of a long-term strategy that will allow Apple to innovate and optimize the modem system for additional Apple products,” Apple says.
What’s interesting about all this is that this investment comes at a cost and not just the $500 billion. Making products in the U.S. is expensive. Apple could do it more cheaply (and will do for a lot of products) in China, India, Vietnam and elsewhere.
Apple’s commitment to the U.S. was likely not in doubt, but the latest spending is an eye-catching commitment.
