Apple said Wednesday that it would expand its planned investment in the United States as it faces pressure from President Donald Trump to shift its supply chain to American soil.
The splashy announcement came hours before Trump’s wave of country-specific tariffs were set to go into effect. The president’s levy barrage isn’t over yet. Trump has warned he will be announcing tariffs on semiconductors, which could affect iPhones, iPads, MacBooks and other popular Apple products.
Speaking alongside Apple CEO Tim Cook in the Oval Office on Wednesday, Trump said his administration is “going to be putting a very large tariff on chips and semiconductors,” but for any company “building in the United States of America, there’s no charge.” Trump said the semiconductor tariff would be approximately 100% and apply to all chips imported into the country.
Apple also said it will manufacture the glass covers on all iPhones and Apple Watch devices sold worldwide in the United States. Apple said manufacturing firm Corning will produce that glass at its Harrodsburg, Kentucky, plant under a $2.5 billion commitment.
“Apple will massively increase spending on its domestic supply chain for the iPhone, and will build the largest and most sophisticated smart glass production line in the world,” Trump said.
That plant has been producing glass products for over 60 years, according to a post on Corning’s website. In 2021, Apple said Corning already supplied glass for iPhone, Apple Watch and iPad. Apple also said at the time that “every generation of iPhone glass has been made” at the plant named in Wednesday’s announcement.
Corning will dedicate the entire facility to manufacturing for Apple, and that would boost the glass maker’s manufacturing and engineering workforce in Kentucky by 50%, the tech giant said in a news release.
“I’m glad to be here with you today, and I’m very proud to say that today, we’re committing an additional $100 billion to the United States,” Cook told Trump during their White House event.
Cook also said the company has “already signed new agreements with 10 companies across America” to do additional manufacturing.
“Second, we’re committed to buying American made, advanced rare earth magnets,” he added, noting an agreement announced in July.
Apple supplier Applied Materials also announced that it would invest $200 million in an Arizona factory that manufactures chip-making equipment. That equipment will be used by Texas Instruments, another Apple supplier, to make some semiconductors used in Apple’s products.
Apple said the glass manufacturing announcement was part of a $600 billion commitment to bring parts of its supply chains to the U.S. Previously, the company had vowed to invest $500 billion over the next four years.
“Apple will also build a 250,000-square-foot server manufacturing facility in Houston, and invest billions of dollars to construct data centers across the country from North Carolina to Iowa to Oregon,” Trump also said.
Apple had previously announced the Houston server plant, which is estimated to open in 2026.
However, Wednesday’s announcement doesn’t mean manufacturing or assembly of any of the company’s major products, such as the iPhone, iPad or MacBook, will come to the States. Cook told reporters that final assembly of iPhones wouldn’t happen in the U.S. “for a while,” even though “there’s a lot” of pieces made in the U.S. Most iPhones are manufactured in India and China.
Most of Apple’s most popular products are currently exempt from tariffs while the Commerce Department conducts a so-called Section 232 investigation to determine the national security impact of importing those products and their parts. Despite the exemptions, Apple took an $800 million hit in the last quarter from tariffs and predicted it will take another $1.5 billion hit in the next three months.
In a May social media post, Trump said: “I have long ago informed Tim Cook of Apple that I expect their iPhone’s that will be sold in the United States of America will be manufactured and built in the United States, not India, or anyplace else.”
Trump on Wednesday conceded that some recent factory announcements may take a number of years to materialize.
“So I don’t know when it shows up, but there are a lot of factories and a lot of plants that are either under construction or soon we’ll be starting construction,” he said. “So can’t tell you exactly when, but I want to be around in about a year from now and two years from now, because we’re going to see an explosion, I think.”
Apple’s investment pledge bears some similarities to recent announcements from the president. OpenAI, Oracle and Japan’s Softbank collectively pledged $500 billion to invest in building out data centers across the country to power artificial intelligence applications.
But months after being announced, the plans reportedly hit some snags. The three firms said they would “immediately” begin investing but now the plans call for just one small data center in Ohio by the end of the year.
A trade agreement between the Trump administration and the European Union included what they said would be $600 billion of investments in the United States and $750 billion of energy purchases.
“They gave me $600 billion, and that’s a gift,” Trump said on CNBC Tuesday. “They gave us $600 billion that we can invest in anything we want.”
However, the E.U. said in a statement that European companies have only “expressed interest in investing at least $600 billion.” The E.U. does not have any mechanism in place to incentivize those investments. Similarly, the E.U. has said $750 billion is only a projection of potential energy purchases over the next three years.
