I'm surprised that Apple is not considering opening up its own fabs. Tim Cook is all about vertical-integration and they have a mountain of cash that they could use to fund the initial startup capex.

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bob1029 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Semiconductor manufacturing is not an incremental step for Apple. It's an entirely new kind of vertical. They do not have the resources to do this. If they could they would have by now.

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boredatoms 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

They could buy global foundaries and pour in a pile of cash, 5 years later they’d have something useful

Or they could buy out Intel and sell off their cpu design division

	▲	bgnn 5 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		In that case they would have just burnt cash for 5 years and didn't have anything to show for it.
	▲	alt227 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		If it was that simple, they would have done it.

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JKCalhoun 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

How do they not have the resources? Certainly they have the cash resources.

At this point it would be corporate suicide if they were not outlining a strategy to own their own fab(s).

	▲	bob1029 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. plans to spend a record of up to $56 billion this year to feed the world’s insatiable appetite for chips, as it grapples with pressure to build more factories outside Taiwan, especially in the U.S. [0] Apple has less cash available than TSMC plans to burn this year. TSMC is not spending 50 billion dollars just because it's fun to do so. This is how much it takes just to keep the wheels on the already existing bus. Starting from zero is a non-starter. It just cannot happen anymore. So, no one in their right mind would sell Apple their leading edge foundry at a discount either. There was a time when companies like Apple could have done this. That time was 15+ years ago. It's way too late now. [0]: https://www.wsj.com/business/earnings/tsmc-ends-2025-with-a-...

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zvqcMMV6Zcr 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Designing CPUs also wasn't their core business and they did it anyway. Apple probably won't care that much about price hikes but if they ever feel TSMC can't guarantee steady supply then all bets are off.

I wonder what will happen in future when we get closer to the physical "wall". Will it allow other fabs to catch up or the opposite will happen, and even small improvements will be values by customers?

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cmgbhm 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Apple has very much been wanted absolute flexibility to adopt major technology changes so much they’ve tried hard to not be the sole customer of a supplier and deal with political ramifications (source: Apple in China/Patrick McGee)

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xnx 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

$20 billion for a new fab is a lot of money, even to Apple.

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DetroitThrow 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Closer to $40b for a new fab for an established company to do it all correctly. It's a much more major investment to open a fab without ever doing it before, then continually use the brain power/institutional knowledge you've built up to stay near the forefront of fab tech, and then basically have weird incentives to build a foundry for only your products rather than the world at large.

You're setting yourself up for making a huge part of your future revenue stream being set aside for ongoing chipfab capex and research engineering. And that's a huge gamble, since getting this all setup is not guaranteed to succeed.

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JKCalhoun 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Is that true? I guess what I mean is, is it $40B if you are trying to replicate the scale of a TSMC fab? Or could you do it for considerably less if the fab is initially designed to the needs of single customer (Apple)?

	▲	DetroitThrow 14 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Closer to $40B for some of the latest fabs from TSMC you're seeing, yes. While there could be huge simplification in SoC and packaging processes if it was focused on a single product, Apple's needs will likely still be about having cutting edge processors, so it would still be pretty high even if they were to just buy TSMC.

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HardCodedBias 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

If it were only 20B then Apple would jump at the chance.

As would almost innumerable others.

	▲	JKCalhoun 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Well, if the future of your company depends on a fab, twice $20B is cheap.