Apple on Monday announced the company will invest more than $500 billion in the U.S. over the next four years, including plans to build a new factory and hire 20,000 people in the country, just days after the iPhone maker's CEO Tim Cook met with President Donald Trump.
Apple's announcement comes just days after the company's CEO Tim Cook met with President Donald ... [+]
In a press release, Cook said the company’s new “$500 billion commitment” includes a doubling of its “Advanced Manufacturing Fund” from $5 billion to $10 billion and building a new “advanced manufacturing facility in Houston.”
The factory in Houston will be used to manufacture servers the company plans to deploy to support its artificial intelligence platform, Apple Intelligence.
The expanded Advanced Manufacturing Fund—which the company first announced in 2017 to support “high-skilled manufacturing jobs”—includes a “multibillion-dollar commitment” toward chipmaker TSMC’s new manufacturing facility in Arizona.
The investment will also cover the creation of an academy in Michigan to “train the next generation of U.S. manufacturers,” further research and development investments and “Apple TV+ productions in 20 states.”
In a bid to expand its AI offerings, the company said it will add to its data center capacity in North Carolina, Iowa, Oregon, Arizona, and Nevada.
Of the 20,000 people Apple plans to hire over the next few years, the company said a “vast majority” of them will be “focused on R&D, silicon engineering, software development, and AI and machine learning.”
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Cook met with the president last week amid concerns about the potential impact his import tariffs would have on Apple’s products. Trump appeared to give away Cook’s plans on Friday while addressing the Governors Working Session. In his speech, Trump mentioned meeting Cook and said “he's investing hundreds of billions of dollars…I hope he's announced it, hope I didn't announce this. But what the hell, all I do is tell the truth…That's what he told me now, he has to do it right?” The president then mentioned that the company stopped its plans to build two manufacturing plants in Mexico and that “they're going to build them here instead, because they don't want to pay the tariffs. Tariffs are amazing.”
Cook was one of the several prominent Silicon Valley founders and CEOs who attended Trump’s inauguration last month. Other prominent attendees included Trump’s close ally and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. A few weeks before the ceremony, Axios reported that Cook donated $1 million of his personal wealth to Trump’s inaugural fund. In December last year, Cook met Trump at his Mar-a-Lago residence over dinner.