Apple To Spend $500B On U.S. Manufacturing, Build Houston Factory
The world’s most valuable tech company plans to spend half a trillion dollars on investment in U.S. manufacturing.
Apple announced Monday that it plans to spend $500B over the next four years on manufacturing investments, including building a new facility outside of Houston, doubling its investment in U.S. advanced manufacturing and opening a training center in Detroit meant to train the next generation of artificial intelligence experts.
“We are bullish on the future of American innovation,” CEO Tim Cook said in a statement.
The planned 250K SF facility in Texas will manufacture servers and data center infrastructure previously built outside the country. The facility is slated to open next year and will create thousands of jobs, according to Apple.
A specific location of the plant wasn’t announced, but Taiwanese manufacturing giant Foxconn, which builds much of Apple’s internal hardware, purchased its own tract of land north of the city last year, which it said would be used to support its AI business, The New York Times reported.
Apple is also doubling its U.S. manufacturing fund, created in 2017 to support investment in high-skilled manufacturing jobs, from $5B to $10B. That “includes a multibillion-dollar commitment from Apple to produce advanced silicon in Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.'s Fab 21 facility in Arizona,” the company said.
The company committed to hiring roughly 20,000 people to support AI and machine learning development. It is launching the Apple Manufacturing Academy in Detroit, which will partner with area universities to create free courses that teach manufacturing skills like project management and process optimization.
It also plans to leverage the academy to consult with businesses about implementing AI and new manufacturing techniques into their operations.
The announcement comes a week after Cook met with President Donald Trump, who has been pushing to bring more AI and data center investment into the country. Trump signaled that Cook had made the investment commitment to him at the meeting.
Last month, the president was joined by the leaders of OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle at the White House to roll out Stargate, their own planned $500B investment in data centers, which is starting with a sprawling $3.4B data center campus west of Dallas that is already under construction.
Global manufacturers have been shifting some production back to or near the U.S. since the pandemic revealed the inherent weaknesses of a global supply chain. Annualized spending on manufacturing facilities has tripled since 2021, and factories are expected to account for a quarter of all industrial demand by 2028.
Much of the new manufacturing demand is emerging to support the breakneck pace of data center growth as companies race to integrate AI into their operations.
But there are signs that demand may be cresting. Microsoft, one of OpenAI’s largest investors and a leader in the AI arms race, is backing out of some of its data center leases, according to TD Cowen.
Microsoft reportedly walked away from the cumulative equivalent of two new data centers. While the company declined to provide a reason, it could be a broader signal that tech firms are shifting away from the expand-at-all-cost cadence that has dominated the last two years.
