[JanSolo]

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.

[bob1029]

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.

[boredatoms]

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

[zvqcMMV6Zcr]

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?

[JKCalhoun]

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).

[cmgbhm]

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)

[xnx]

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

[DetroitThrow]

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.

[HardCodedBias]

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

As would almost innumerable others.

[LunaSea]

Apple has around $55B in cash, much more in stocks.