Apple and Intel have reached a preliminary agreement under which Intel will manufacture processors for Apple devices at its United States fabrication plants, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday morning. The arrangement, the product of more than a year of talks, is the most consequential foundry win for Intel's contract-manufacturing arm since it formally separated the business from its design operations in 2024.
The deal would not displace Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, which has been Apple's sole supplier of leading-edge silicon for the past decade and which is on the leading edge of the 2-nanometre node. Industry analysts expect Intel to take on lower-end M-series and A-series chips first — including those used in entry-level iPad and Mac models — before climbing to higher-volume SKUs as its 18A and 14A nodes mature.
Intel shares jumped 14 per cent to close at a record on Thursday after the report broke; the stock has now risen more than 5x in the past year. Apple closed up 2 per cent. The reaction reflected the strategic stakes: Apple has been working publicly to add a second leading-edge supplier since the COVID-era shortages, and Intel has been searching for an anchor customer to validate its capacity expansion in Arizona, Ohio and New Mexico.
The Trump administration, which became Intel's largest shareholder in late 2024 through a stake in the converted CHIPS Act loans, played an active role in the negotiations, two people familiar with the talks said. The White House views the deal as a flagship for its policy of bringing more advanced manufacturing to the United States, and senior officials had pressed both companies through last year's antitrust review to find common ground.
A separate track in the discussions involves Samsung Foundry, which Apple has approached about manufacturing some of the company's cellular modem and image-sensor designs. Bloomberg first reported the Samsung talks on Tuesday.
Intel chief executive Lip-Bu Tan, who took over from Pat Gelsinger in early 2025, has staked the company's turnaround on third-party foundry revenues. The Apple agreement, if finalised, would amount to validation that the strategy can compete with TSMC for the most demanding mobile silicon customers in the world.