Apple announced Monday plans to build a 250,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Houston by 2026, as the tech giant ramps up its U.S. investments to over $500 billion in the next four years. This expansion supports Apple’s ‘Apple Intelligence,’ an in-house artificial intelligence system that will be a core focus for the company.
According to CEO Tim Cook, the company is enthusiastic about American innovation. “We are bullish on the future of American innovation, and we’re proud to build on our long-standing U.S. investments with this $500 billion commitment to our country’s future,” Cook said in a statement Monday. “From doubling our advanced manufacturing fund, to building advance technology in Texas, we’re thrilled to expand our support for American manufacturing.” The company plans to work with people and companies across the country to help push innovation forward, Cook added.
The Houston facility will produce components for Apple’s artificial intelligence system and is slated to generate thousands of jobs in the area. Moreover, Apple plans to hire 20,000 employees in the next four years dedicated to research and development, silicon engineering, software development, and machine learning. The company stated that it aims to start production of the artificial intelligence servers in Houston later this year, working with manufacturing partners to support this effort.
Previously, these AI servers were manufactured outside of the United States. Now, the servers which will be assembled in Houston “play a key role in powering Apple Intelligence, and are the foundation of Private Cloud Compute, which combines powerful AI processing with the most advance security architecture ever deployed at scale for AI cloud computing,” the company explained.
Although the exact location in Houston was not immediately available on Monday, Apple highlighted that the servers were designed to be energy-efficient, helping reduce demands on the company’s data centers that already run on 100 percent renewable energy. In addition to the Houston facility, Apple has plans to expand its operations in North Carolina, Iowa, Oregon, Arizona, and Nevada.
