Intel stock surged 9% in premarket trading Thursday after President Donald Trump said on Truth Social that Apple had agreed to design and build chips with the company inside the United States. The post, published before the U.S. market open on June 18, capped a 464% run in Intel shares over the past 12 months and lifted the chipmaker's market cap to $608.7 billion. Apple stock moved 0.6% higher in the same premarket session.
Trump framed the agreement as part of a broader push to pull semiconductor design and fabrication back onshore. "Stupid Presidents took our Economy for granted, and let Taiwan and others steal our Semiconductor Factories," he wrote, before announcing the Apple-Intel arrangement. Neither Intel, Apple, the White House, nor the Taipei Representative Office in the U.K. had commented at the time of publication.
“Apple has agreed to work with Intel to design and build its Chips in America.”— Donald Trump, U.S. President
The structure, scope, and timing of the Apple deal were not disclosed. Apple currently designs its own silicon — the M-series and A-series chips that power Macs and iPhones — and has those parts fabricated primarily in Taiwan. A shift of any meaningful share of that volume to Intel's foundry would mark the most significant outside commitment Intel Foundry has landed to date.
Key facts
- 01Intel shares rose 9% in premarket trading Thursday after Trump announced an Apple chip design and manufacturing deal on Truth Social.
- 02Intel stock is up 464% over the past 12 months, taking the company's market cap to $608.7 billion.
- 03Apple shares moved 0.6% higher premarket; Intel was last trading 8.8% up.
- 04The Nasdaq PHLX Semiconductor Sector Index, covering the 30 largest U.S.-traded chip firms, has gained 90% year-to-date.
- 05Elon Musk's TerraFab project, billed as the world's largest chip factory, is being designed with Intel's technology team.
Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan, who took the helm early last year, has spent the past several months pulling the company back into the conversation after years in which it largely missed the AI buildout. Under Tan, Intel has secured investment from Nvidia and from the Trump administration itself, repositioning the chipmaker from a manufacturing laggard into a politically backed national-champion play.
Trump tied those moves together in his post. "I decided to help Intel because we need to design and build our Chips right here in America," he wrote. "First, we helped bring in Nvidia, and they agreed to build their first level Chips with Intel."
He went on to flag a second major commitment: Elon Musk's TerraFab, which Trump described as the largest chip factory in the world, is being designed together with Intel's technology team. TerraFab is the first major outside commitment for Intel's capital-intensive foundry business, which until recently manufactured chips only for Intel's own product lines.
The broader chip tape has been doing the heavy lifting underneath these announcements. The Nasdaq PHLX Semiconductor Sector Index, which tracks the 30 largest U.S.-traded chip companies, is up 90% year-to-date. Conflict in the Middle East has disrupted supply chains and sent oil prices higher, but the AI infrastructure trade has so far insulated semiconductor names from the macro drag.
Intel itself has been one of the more striking recoveries on that tape. The stock spent years range-bound as the company ceded process leadership to TSMC and Samsung, missed the initial AI accelerator wave dominated by Nvidia, and absorbed write-downs on delayed manufacturing nodes. A 464% twelve-month move is the market repricing Intel from a value trap into something closer to a strategic asset.
What's still unclear is how much of the Apple announcement translates into near-term foundry revenue versus a longer design-partnership arc. Apple has invested heavily in its own silicon team and its relationship with TSMC, and shifting leading-edge nodes is a multi-year process. A Truth Social post does not, on its own, lock in wafer commitments, and neither company has confirmed which products, which nodes, or which volumes are involved.
For Intel, the political tailwind is now doing what years of roadmap slides could not. Stacking Nvidia, Apple, and Musk's TerraFab onto the foundry order book — even in announcement form — gives Tan a credibility runway to keep spending on advanced nodes while the rest of the market keeps bidding the stock up. The risk is that the foundry economics still have to work: leading-edge fabs cost tens of billions, customers demand yield, and the gap to TSMC closes in process steps, not press releases. If Intel converts even a fraction of these commitments into shipping wafers, it reshapes the U.S. AI supply chain. If it doesn't, the 464% move starts looking like the easy part.
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