Tim Cook failing on the Cook doctrine ("We believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products that we make") is ironic.

I'm sure if Apple could manage to run a fab with the quality and costs they get with TSMC, they would. I have little doubt they've been pushing forward on that mission.

Owning a leading edge fab is not practical for most companies, even huge some ones like Apple.

Intel has even struggled with it since they traditionally didn’t sell capacity to other buyers. It worked for Intel because they traditionally had a near-monopoly over the laptop, desktop, and server chip market.

Apple certainly has the money to spin up their own chip fabricator, but there’s no guarantee it would be as good as TSMC, it would cost billions, and they would have less of an ability to sell capacity to other customers.

At the end of that effort they could be left with a chip fab that produces chips that still cost the same or more than what TSMC manufactures them for. It might just be cheaper to try and outbid Nvidia for priority.