In short
- Apple and Intel have reached their first chip manufacturing deal in more than a year, according to The Wall Street Journal.
- Intel stock hit a record high of $130.57 on May 8, 2026, surpassing its dot-com all-time high of $74.88 since August 2000 by nearly 74%.
- President Trump asked Tim Cook to participate in the deal, where the US government has a share of about 10% of Intel purchased at $ 20.47 per share.
Intel and Apple have reached the first agreement for Intel to make some of Apple’s devices, The Wall Street Journal reported. report Friday. Negotiations between the two companies have been going on for over a year.
Markets did not wait for the publication to be successful. Intel jumped 13% on Friday, hitting an intraday high of $130.57—clearing the dot-com company’s all-time high of $75.81, back in 2000, about 72%. In the news: 365 days ago, Intel was trading near its 52-week low of $18.96.
What Intel will do for Apple is still unknown, but Apple ships more than 200 million iPhones a year on top of millions of iPads and Macs. It comes at a good time for Intel, as Nvidia and AMD have been steadily eating into their market share.
Apple currently relies almost exclusively on TSMC for its chips. Intel can focus on low-end products and offer other Apple models.
The White House took direct action to make the deal happen. President Trump recommended Intel to Tim Cook during a meeting at the White House. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick was also on the panel. With this deal, Intel could be growing a bigger business (as the charts show), and the Trump administration could win a political victory after clearly pushing the importance of US chip manufacturing. Apple’s involvement could help improve its relationship with the Trump administration.
The government has its own cause for concern. Last August, US found a 9.9% stake in Intel by buying 433.3 million shares at $20.47 each – a total of $8.9 billion funded through the CHIPS and Science Act and semiconductor protection programs, per Intel’s SEC filing. With Intel now trading above $120, this position has risen to $50 billion in value. Trump went on Truth Social last week to ask himself if he “made the United States of America more than 30 billion dollars.”
Intel’s revolutionary story has had many moving parts. The government sector was followed by a Panther Lake chip setup-Intel’s first for its high-end 18A production-then a $5 billion investment from Nvidia and an injection of $2 billion from SoftBank. Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan, who took over in March 2025 years after Intel lost market share to AMD, Nvidia and Apple Silicon, has been on the hunt for partners and customers ever since.
AMD has been pushing hard. Like Decrypt report last OctoberAMD secured a massive 6 gigawatt GPU deal with OpenAI—a deal that included OpenAI acquiring 10% of AMD’s stock. It was AMD staking its claim in AI architecture. Intel, by contrast, was betting on the core customers. Now it must have reached the largest we can imagine.
The first Intel-made chips made by Apple, if time is anything to go by, will be around 18 months old.
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