Apple and Intel have reached a preliminary agreement for Intel to manufacture some of the chips that power Apple devices, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday May 8, 2026, citing people familiar with the matter.
The two companies have been in intensive talks for more than a year and formalized a preliminary deal in recent months. Neither company has commented publicly on the report.
Intel’s stock surged approximately 14 percent on the news, hitting a record high of $126.23, surpassing the company’s previous all-time high set during the dot-com boom of 2000.
Apple shares were up approximately 2 percent. The deal, if completed, would represent one of the most significant shifts in the global chip manufacturing landscape in years and a meaningful revival for Intel’s long-struggling foundry business.
It would also be the most complicated business reunion in the history of American consumer technology.
What Does The Deal Look Like?
The preliminary agreement would have Intel manufacture chips based on Apple’s own chip designs, the same model under which TSMC currently produces Apple’s M-series chips for Macs, A-series chips for iPhones and related processors across the product line.
Intel would be a manufacturer, not a designer, of the chips, building the hardware to Apple’s specifications rather than contributing its own chip architecture.
What is not yet publicly known is which specific Apple products would use Intel-manufactured chips.
Apple ships more than 200 million iPhones per year as well as millions of iPads and Mac computers.
The company’s chip needs are enormous and span a wide range of complexity, from the cutting-edge processors in the iPhone 17 Pro and the M-series Mac chips to lower-end processors in base iPad models.
Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, who first reported on the Apple-Intel talks last fall, suggested at the time that Intel might start producing chips as early as 2027 and that the initial partnership would likely focus on lower-end M-series chips used in select iPad and Mac models rather than the most advanced iPhone processors.
Analyst Jeff Pu followed up in December with reporting that the potential partnership could eventually extend to iPhone chips as well. Neither projection has been officially confirmed.
The US Government’s Role In Making This Happen
The deal as reported is not simply a commercial negotiation between two companies that independently decided they wanted to work together.
The United States government was an active participant in bringing Apple and Intel to the table, and the effort reached the highest levels of both the administration and the country’s corporate leadership.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick met repeatedly over the past year with senior Apple officials including CEO Tim Cook, as well as with SpaceX and xAI chief Elon Musk and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, to encourage them to work with Intel on chip manufacturing.
The administration official who confirmed this effort said it was not about the government’s equity stake in Intel but about the company’s importance to US semiconductor manufacturing:
“In general, we want to and have been helping Intel. We have been trying to drum up business for Intel.”
The WSJ specifically reported that President Trump personally advocated for Intel to Tim Cook during a meeting at the White House.
That presidential involvement reflects the administration’s view of Intel as a strategic national asset, a company whose survival and revival as a competitive chipmaker is seen as essential to reducing American dependence on foreign semiconductor manufacturing, particularly from Taiwan-based TSMC.
The Trump administration’s relationship with Intel deepened last year when the US government became Intel’s largest shareholder under a deal with CEO Lip-Bu Tan.
That equity stake gives the government a direct financial interest in Intel’s commercial success beyond its policy objectives, though the administration official quoted in the WSJ was explicit that the Apple advocacy was not motivated by the equity position.
Why Apple Wants This
Apple’s current chipmaking situation is one that company leadership has described publicly as a constraint.
Tim Cook has mentioned chip availability issues on recent earnings calls in the context of their impact on iPhone and Mac shipments. The bottleneck is TSMC.
Apple relies on TSMC for all of its most advanced chips. TSMC’s leading-edge fabrication capacity, the facilities capable of producing the smallest, most powerful chips at scale, is also in extremely high demand from Nvidia and AMD, both of which need TSMC’s advanced nodes for AI accelerators.
The same facility that produces Apple’s A-series iPhone chips is producing or will produce Nvidia’s Blackwell and Vera Rubin GPU packages.
When multiple of the world’s most important customers are competing for the same production capacity at the world’s most capable chipmaker, every customer faces constraints.
Diversifying chip manufacturing away from TSMC gives Apple more capacity optionality and reduces the risk that any single supply chain disruption, a typhoon affecting Taiwan, a geopolitical escalation, or a demand surge from a competitor, leaves Apple without enough chips to fulfill its iPhone production schedule.
Intel, as a US-based manufacturer, also addresses a different concern: the geopolitical risk of producing all advanced chips in Taiwan, a location that US national security officials have consistently described as vulnerable to Chinese military pressure.
An Apple-Intel partnership that produces some percentage of Apple’s chip volume domestically reduces that geographic concentration risk.
The Complicated History Between Apple and Intel
Apple and Intel have a longer and more fraught history than the current deal might suggest. From 2006 to 2020, Apple’s Mac computers ran on Intel-designed x86 processors.
That relationship made Intel a critical Apple supplier for 14 years and was one of the defining commercial partnerships in consumer technology during that period.
The relationship had persistent frustrations. Intel’s chip development cycles were slower than Apple’s desired cadence, and the company’s product delays repeatedly affected Apple’s ability to update its Mac lineup on the schedule it wanted.
Tim Cook complained to TSMC founder Morris Chang about Intel, a story that has been widely reported and reflects how deeply the frustrations ran.
When Apple announced its transition to Apple Silicon in June 2020, beginning with the M1 chip manufactured by TSMC, the move was explicitly a departure from Intel.
The last Intel-powered Mac was discontinued in 2023. The era of Apple-Intel partnership appeared to be over.
Less publicly known is what happened even earlier. Before the iPhone era, Intel had an opportunity to manufacture the chips that would power the original iPhone and its successors.
The company passed. The A-series chips that Apple went on to produce with TSMC became the foundation of the most profitable consumer electronics franchise in history.
Intel’s decision not to pursue that business was subsequently described by the company’s own leadership as one of the most consequential commercial mistakes in its history.
The preliminary agreement reported Friday represents Intel now pursuing precisely the role it declined in the smartphone era, manufacturing Apple chips to Apple’s specifications rather than designing chips for Apple to use. The company is building the business it once turned away.
What This Means For The Semiconductor Industry
The announcement of a preliminary Apple-Intel deal lands in the context of an extraordinary period for the semiconductor industry. Intel’s stock has been on a dramatic run, the record high of $126.23 set Friday exceeds the company’s previous all-time high, which was set during the dot-com boom of 2000 at the height of Intel’s original market dominance.
A company that was widely written off as permanently behind TSMC and Samsung in manufacturing capability is now producing chips for Nvidia, working with Elon Musk on AI chip production through the TeraFab project, and reportedly entering a manufacturing relationship with Apple.
Intel’s CEO Lip-Bu Tan has been leading the company’s effort to rebuild its foundry business since taking over in early 2024, following the departure of Pat Gelsinger after a period of disastrous results.
The Apple deal, if finalized, would be the most significant customer win for Intel Foundry Services and the clearest validation yet that the foundry business Tan is building can attract the world’s most demanding customers.
For Apple, the deal provides manufacturing capacity diversification without requiring the company to compromise on chip design, Intel would build what Apple designs, just as TSMC does.
The specific node and process technology Intel would use for Apple chips has not been disclosed. Intel’s 18A process, its most advanced manufacturing node, is currently in production for other customers. Apple’s chip designs would need to be compatible with whatever Intel process is used, which could constrain which chips Intel manufactures initially.
Both companies declined to comment. The deal is preliminary. The details that matter most, which chips, which products, which process node, at what volume and starting when, are not yet public.
What is public is that a year of government advocacy, repeated White House meetings and presidential involvement produced a preliminary agreement between two companies whose history makes the reunion as surprising as the business logic makes it sensible.
