Apple Explores Intel and Samsung as Backup Chipmakers Beyond TSMC

Apple has held early discussions with Intel and Samsung about using new U.S. fabs to make processors for Apple devices, Mark Gurman said. The talks concern Apple’s A-series and M-series chips: the system-on-a-chip designs that power the iPhone, iPad, Mac, and other products.

The point is not that Apple is abandoning Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. Gurman described TSMC as Apple’s longtime manufacturing partner for chips Apple designs in-house. For well over a decade, Apple has designed its main processors itself and relied on TSMC to produce them in Taiwan. Some of that manufacturing has already been shifting to a TSMC fab in Phoenix, and Apple has said it expects “a hundred million chips out of the area by the end of this year,” according to Gurman.

But the Intel and Samsung discussions are about reducing concentration risk. Additional TSMC fabs have been slow to come online, Gurman said, while Apple faces geopolitical tensions, supply-chain issues, and the basic operational problem of relying too heavily on one supplier in one geography.

The potential Intel and Samsung role would be to provide another manufacturing option in the United States, using new fabs those companies are opening there. Gurman characterized the discussions as “early” and “potentially down the road,” not as a settled procurement shift.

Caroline Hyde pressed whether the U.S. manufacturing angle should be understood as a hardware decision, a margin-pressure issue, or a political gambit. Gurman’s answer was that politics is part of the story, but not the largest part.

Working with Intel, Gurman said, could improve Apple’s relationship with the Trump administration. He characterized Intel as a company in which the U.S. government had taken a stake and said Donald Trump had been touting Intel in recent weeks, including its stock price and investment growth. In that context, Gurman argued, an Apple-Intel manufacturing relationship would carry political value.

But Gurman put greater weight on the risk of dependence on Taiwan. If there were “a situation with China,” he said, the geopolitical position would be poor for Apple. He also noted that, months earlier, Apple had concerns related to tariffs and the need to do more chip production in the U.S. to avoid them. Those tariff concerns sit inside a broader supply-chain calculation: Apple wants additional suppliers for what Gurman called perhaps the most critical component in its entire supply chain.

That logic is familiar elsewhere in Apple’s manufacturing system. Gurman contrasted chips with components such as displays and speakers, where Apple commonly uses several suppliers to reduce exposure to disruption. The issue with Apple silicon is that the consequences of interruption are more severe: without the processors, the products do not work.

Gurman described Taiwan-based chip supply as “probably the biggest risk factor for Apple right now.” The proposed expansion of silicon manufacturing partners, in his framing, is therefore not merely politics or a question of margins. It is a plan for backup chipmaking capacity for the component that determines whether Apple can ship its major devices at all.

Bloomberg displayed positive market moves for Apple, Intel, and Samsung alongside the supply-chain discussion: Apple up 1.48%, Intel up 12.99%, and Samsung Electronics up 8.70% on an intraday basis. A separate one-year Apple chart showed a 41.03% gain.

Those figures served as market context, not as evidence that the supplier talks caused the stock moves. The operational claim was narrower: Apple is exploring whether Intel and Samsung can give it another path to U.S.-based processor production because its current concentration of chip manufacturing creates a risk it cannot ignore.