Apple promises to spend $500B, hire 20K over 4 years to swerve Trump import tariffs

Sorry, that should read: Boost US manufacturing and R&D, believe in the American people, etc etc

As computer makers grapple with Trump's tariffs, Apple is doubling down on US manufacturing and research-and-development investments, announcing plans to spend $500 billion and hire 20,000 people over the next four years in America to support these efforts.

The commitment, announced Monday, comes as the White House pushes through wave after wave of new tariffs on everything from Chinese imports to key commodities including foreign-made steel and aluminum. The administration has also signaled steep import taxes on foreign-made semiconductors. These levies are likely to be passed onto American end buyers.

Of course, Apple's announcement makes no reference to tariffs nor the Trump administration, with CEO Tim Cook issuing a canned statement touting the whole thing as an investment in the American people. "We are bullish on the future of American innovation and we're proud to build on our long-standing US investments with this $500 billion commitment to our country's future," Cook said in a release.

However, many of the planned investments are clearly intended to help at least to some degree insulate the iGiant from the Trump administration's infatuation with import taxes.

AI servers production in Texas, Silicon in Arizona

Among all the stuff announced today is a manufacturing plan slated for Houston, Texas, which Apple says will produce AI-accelerating servers based on its in-house Arm-compatible silicon.  While we don't know much about these servers nor the silicon that powers them just yet, the M-series silicon found in Apple's iPads and Macs has proven particularly potent for powering AI workloads such as large language models, thanks in part to large quantities of fast DDR RAM.

The proposed 250,000-square-foot facility is expected to begin production sometime next year and employ "thousands" of workers. The systems produced at the plant will deployed at datacenters across North Carolina, Iowa, Oregon, Arizona, and Nevada, where they'll power Apple's Private Cloud Compute platform and Apple Intelligence services.

Announced last year at WWDC, the cloud platform is designed to handle machine-learning workloads deemed too resource intensive to be run directly on personal devices. However, it's not just the servers that will be manufactured domestically.

As part of this whole brainwave, Apple has promised to double its US Advanced Manufacturing Fund from $5 billion today to $10 billion in 2029. Created in 2017, the program sought to on-shore select manufacturing jobs to the US. A large part of this is intended to help transition more chip production from Taiwan to TSMC's new Fab 21 site in Arizona. That is to say, rather than rely on TSMC to make so much of the iTitan's processors abroad, it'll be done more and more on United States soil instead.

According to Apple, production of chips at the plant began last month, and more importantly should help isolate Apple to some degree from upcoming semiconductor import tariffs, which is expected to start around 25 percent and ramp up over the course of about a year. It remains to be seen just how much capacity TSMC's Arizona plant will be able to handle, but Apple does say it'll be the foundry operator's largest customer at the site.

Apple also appears to be diversifying its silicon supply chain for all the other chips its devices rely on. The iGiant claims its suppliers are now manufacturing silicon used in its products in 24 factories across 12 US states.

To fill all these new manufacturing jobs, Apple plans to establish an academy in Michigan to train workers.

But while Apple went out its way to highlight US-made servers and chips, the announcement today made no mention of on-shoring the production of other devices, which may incur tariffs when imported into America from abroad. The Cupertino outfit has previously manufactured the Mac Pro domestically, but reportedly moved production back to China in 2019, for instance. iPhones, as another example, are still made in China as well as India.

Thus Monday's marketing drive by Apple may well mean more semiconductor and server manufacturing is coming to America, thus avoiding certain import levies, a lot is left up in the air in terms of what needs to be paid on all the other stuff the macOS titan makes overseas and imports into the USA.

Apple looks to grow US R&D

In addition to manufacturing, Apple is looking to expand its research and development investments across the US, with continuing the trend toward vertical integration clearly a goal.

In its annnouncement, Apple highlighted its new C1 cellular modem — which, we'll note it's been working on for half a decade going back to the acquisition of Intel's modem business in 2019.

To support future developments like this, the Mac maker plans to add around 20,000 workers to its R&D staff with silicon engineering, software development, and AI and machine learning being key areas of focus. ®