INTC Rips After Trump Says Apple Will Make Chips at Intel

Trump Made the Announcement, Not Apple

The move came from a Truth Social post. Trump wrote that Apple has agreed to work with Intel to design and build its chips in America, and INTC ran roughly 6% to 9% in premarket trading before extending the gain to $133.10 in the regular session.

The wrinkle worth sitting with: the only source is the post. Neither Apple nor Intel has confirmed it, and the announcement landed outside normal business hours with both companies silent. The Wall Street Journal reported back in May that Intel had reached a *preliminary* deal to make some chips for Apple after more than a year of talks, so this isn't out of nowhere — but a Truth Social post is not a signed customer agreement. It's also not lost on anyone that Washington holds a 10% stake in Intel, which gives the administration a direct financial motive to put this deal on the tape. Trump used the same post to name-drop Nvidia and Elon Musk's TeraFab as Intel foundry wins.

The Setup Was Already Loaded

Two days before the Apple post, Intel's 18A-P node entered risk production at the VLSI Symposium — the manufacturing gate external customers, Apple included, were waiting on before committing volume. HIPERWIRE covered that as the foundry bid returning into the dip. The Apple headline is what that bid was pricing in.

The sell side had already turned. Bank of America's Vivek Arya issued a rare double upgrade, moving INTC from Underperform to Buy and lifting the target to $135 from $96, citing stronger server-CPU demand from agentic AI workloads and improved foundry visibility after reports Google would have Intel produce more than three million TPUs in 2028. BofA's model has Intel foundry revenue climbing from about $1.1 billion in 2026 to $47.1 billion by 2030. The Q1 print backed the direction: $13.58 billion revenue and a data-center and AI segment up 22% to $5.1 billion. Add an Apple logo to that pipeline and the foundry flips from a money-losing internal cost center into a genuine external business — that's the bull thesis the tape is buying.

The Asterisk

What keeps this honest: there is no company confirmation, which means headline risk cuts both ways. A formal Apple or Intel statement validates the post and the move sticks; a walk-back or a 'preliminary talks only' clarification and a lot of this air comes out fast. JPMorgan had already waved off the earlier Google enthusiasm as a storm in a teacup, arguing those chips could still be fabbed at TSMC with Intel handling only packaging — the same skepticism applies here until node and volume are specified.

The economics are also slower than the price action implies. Apple's most advanced silicon has lived at TSMC for years, and qualifying a second source is a multi-quarter-into-multi-year process; the revenue from any of these wins lands in 2028 and beyond, not this quarter. With INTC up roughly 250% year-to-date, a large amount of foundry optionality is already in the stock. The clean tell from here is simple: an actual Apple or Intel filing or on-record statement confirming the Trump post.