Apple Announces Plan to Spend More Than $500 Billion in the U.S. Over the Next Four Years (Which Is Probably Exactly What They’ve Been Planning to Do)

Apple Newsroom:

Apple today announced its largest-ever spend commitment, with plans to spend and invest more than $500 billion in the U.S. over the next four years.

The context of making a big deal over this announcement, of course, is that Apple is seeking exemptions from the Trump administration’s tariffs. $500 billion is a lot of money, even for Apple, and 20,000 new jobs over the next four years is a lot of jobs, especially at a time when many big tech companies are laying off, not hiring. (The federal government is trying to lay off a lot of employees too, if you haven’t heard.) But as the WSJ notes in their story on this announcement, those 20,000 new jobs are a continuation of their existing hiring growth: “The company, which had 164,000 full-time equivalent employees as of September, has added an average of 5,400 annually over the past five years.”

Apple announced a similar plan four years ago — $430 billion and 20,000 jobs. In the announcement of that 2021 plan, Apple said, “Over the past three years, Apple’s contributions in the US have significantly outpaced the company’s original five-year goal of $350 billion set in 2018.”

So I don’t think this announcement is bullshit, at all. But I also don’t think what Apple has announced today is much, if any, different from what they’d be doing if Kamala Harris had gotten 1–2 percent more of the vote in a handful of states in November. The difference is that everyone is looking for quid pro quo with President Transactional back in office.

Apple again:

As part of its new U.S. investments, Apple will work with manufacturing partners to begin production of servers in Houston later this year. A 250,000-square-foot server manufacturing facility, slated to open in 2026, will create thousands of jobs.

Previously manufactured outside the U.S., the servers that will soon be assembled in Houston play a key role in powering Apple Intelligence, and are the foundation of Private Cloud Compute, which combines powerful AI processing with the most advanced security architecture ever deployed at scale for AI cloud computing. The servers bring together years of R&D by Apple engineers, and deliver the industry-leading security and performance of Apple silicon to the data center.

Kind of interesting that the big manufacturing news is a product that Apple doesn’t even sell, but produces only for its own use. I don’t think this is a hint that they might begin selling servers (again), but who knows? I also wonder whether there’s a corporate-espionage security angle to assembling these servers here, rather than in China.

★ Monday, 24 February 2025