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Days after Apple’s chief executive met with President Trump, the company said on Monday that it planned to spend $500 billion and hire 20,000 people in the United States over the next four years and open a factory in Texas to make the machines that power the company’s push into artificial intelligence.
We are bullish on the future of American innovation, and we’re proud to build on our longstanding U.S. investments,” Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, said in a statement. The company made similar, smaller pledges during the Biden administration and Mr. Trump’s first term, though it has not yet followed through on some of those promises.
Apple will continue to make the bulk of what it sells — iPhones, iPads and Macs — in Asia. Its overseas manufacturing footprint has been a point of contention with Mr. Trump since before he was first elected president in 2016.
Apple is facing tariffs for the first time on iPhones and the threat of tariffs on other products made overseas. The majority of iPhones are made in China, and U.S. tariffs of 10 percent on all Chinese products took effect this month.
Gene Munster, managing partner at Deepwater Asset Management, said he expected that Apple would again be spared from tariffs because of its promise to invest $500 billion in the United States.
The investment represents $39 billion in annual spending above what Apple promised to spend on employees and suppliers in the United States in 2021, he said. It is in line with Apple’s average annual increase in U.S. investment to support its growth since 2017. And the 20,000 jobs that Apple said it would add is in line with the number of people it would hire over a four-year span in the United States.
This is a calculated trade-off for tariffs,” Mr. Munster said. “Trump made it clear: You have to show me some love. The question is: How much is that worth to Apple? And the answer is they would rather spend this money themselves on infrastructure than give it to Uncle Sam.”
Apple and the White House didn’t immediately have comment.
Companies have mixed records of fulfilling their promises to Mr. Trump. In 2018, Apple promised to build a campus in a new location as part of a $350 billion investment, but it hasn’t yet done so. That same year, its partner Foxconn held a groundbreaking in Wisconsin for a $10 billion high-tech campus that would employ 13,000 people. Foxconn has built some buildings but not the promised plant.
To support the A.I. service called Apple Intelligence, the company has developed custom semiconductors for its servers that are strung together in a cloud network that it has said is more private because it’s not stored or accessible, even by Apple. The Apple servers being made in Houston could accelerate the company’s effort to build out that A.I. offering.
The world’s most advanced A.I. servers depend on an intricate network of companies that have spent decades developing specialized tools and processes. They contain chips made by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, which produces the majority of cutting-edge computer chips in Taiwan and depends on machines made by the Dutch company ASML.
TSMC has also been expanding its manufacturing footprint in the United States. In 2020, the company said it would build a factory in Arizona; it quickly announced a second and then a third amid a push from the Biden administration to boost U.S. chip manufacturing.
The company has already started making chips for Apple in Arizona. Apple described its announcement on Monday as its “largest-ever spend commitment.” The $500 billion would go toward manufacturing facilities, data centers, and entertainment productions, the company said.
Apple employs more than 150,000 people around the world.
Monday’s statement had echoes of prior Apple announcements. Four years ago, a few months after Mr. Biden’s inauguration, Apple announced an “acceleration” of its U.S. investments, pledging to spend $430 billion and add 20,000 jobs over five years. In January 2018, during Mr. Trump’s first term, the company said that its “direct contribution to the U.S. economy” would be $350 billion over five years and that it planned to create 20,000 jobs over that period.
Mr. Trump thanked Apple and Mr. Cook in a social media post on Monday. Mr. Trump said the move showed that the company had “faith in what we are doing.”
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