SANTA CLARA, California, May 10, 2026, 10:31 PDT
Intel Corporation’s preliminary chipmaking deal with Apple, reported Friday, has thrust its manufacturing ambitions back into the spotlight—this time with sharper scrutiny. The Wall Street Journal said the two companies reached a formal agreement in recent months, following over a year of discussions. Details on which products Intel will make remain murky, while both Intel and Apple declined to comment.
Apple could hand Intel Foundry its first big-name external client—a major win for the chipmaker’s contract-manufacturing push. Foundries like Intel’s build chips to order for customers, and Apple has been looking into alternatives to its longtime partner, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., as chip supply issues and questions about reliability and scale continue to hang over non-TSMC options.
In New York trading Friday, Intel finished at $124.92, marking a 13.9% gain after reaching $130.46 earlier in the session. Apple, meanwhile, added 2.0% to close at $293.32—a smaller percentage jump, but its market cap still dwarfs Intel’s.
Intel’s report drops at a pivotal juncture. The company has spent years pitching itself as more than just a producer of its own PC and server chips. TSMC, meanwhile, keeps its grip on leading-edge chipmaking, supplying Apple and a big slice of the AI sector.
Washington factors in here too. According to the Journal, as reported by Reuters, the U.S. government—now Intel’s biggest shareholder after last year’s deal with Chief Executive Lip-Bu Tan—was key in getting Apple into talks. The Trump administration has been pressing for more chip manufacturing to move to the U.S.
The AI boom is the bigger story here. Last month, Intel reported a 7% bump in first-quarter revenue, up to $13.6 billion, and projected second-quarter sales between $13.8 billion and $14.8 billion, crediting the rise to stronger CPU demand—the standard chips powering most computer functions. Tan pointed out that the “next wave of AI” is pushing up demand not just for Intel’s CPUs, but for its advanced packaging as well. Intel
The shift from training to inference—that moment when AI starts fielding questions and performing tasks—has put new weight on the conversation. Investors, according to Reuters, are turning their attention to CPU producers like Intel and AMD as winners in this next chapter, not simply Nvidia, which dominated early with its graphics chips.
But don’t expect Apple to solve Intel’s foundry math right away. Intel Foundry’s first-quarter revenue hit $5.4 billion, yet operating losses still ran about $2.44 billion, according to the company’s own numbers. Trust from clients is only part of the equation; actually producing cutting-edge chips profitably—and at scale—is a different challenge entirely.
Here’s the thing: Apple’s agreement is still just an early-stage deal—no details on products, no production timeline, nothing firm yet. Earlier coverage pointed out Apple’s lingering doubts about anyone but TSMC handling the work at scale or with enough reliability. Orders could wind up limited, delayed, or tied to less advanced tech, in which case Friday’s bump in the shares may have gotten ahead of itself.
Michael Schulman, partner at Cerity Partners, described Intel’s long-term strategy as a “high-stakes gamble” — betting it can shift from a legacy chip giant into a real foundry competitor by 2030. For Bob O’Donnell, who heads TECHnalysis Research, the marker on Intel’s comeback is simple: if the foundry business is pulling real weight by 2027, the turnaround’s nearly there, he told Reuters. Reuters
At this point, investors are looking at a clearer setup compared to just a month back: demand for AI-related CPUs is improving, there’s talk of a potential manufacturing tie-up with Apple, and Washington is in Intel’s corner. What matters next isn’t big headlines — it’s whether Intel actually puts numbers on the board: orders, volumes, specifics on products and timing.
