Tech giants Apple and Intel have reportedly signed a preliminary deal to collaborate on chip-making efforts. The tech giants had been discussing a potential agreement for over a year which has finally materialized this week, claimed a report by the Wall Street Journal citing sources familiar with the matter.
With Apple as a partner, Intel will secure a stream of consistent demand for its semiconductors. This will boost its manufacturing business, which in recent years, has seen a slowdown compared to other Competitors like TSMC.
Last year in August, the U.S. government purchased around a ten percent stake in Intel. The U.S. government presently holds over 433 million primary shares of Intel’s common stock.
According to the Wall Street Journal report, the U.S. government played a crucial role in bringing Apple to the table for negotiations with Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan.
The potential partnership between Apple and Intel had been garnering attention among tech researchers for a while now.
Ming-Chi Kuo, an analyst at renowned Apple forecastersTF International Securities, had spoken about the possibility of a possible deal in November 2025.
“Intel expected to begin shipping Apple’s lowest-end M processor as early as 2027. My latest industry surveys, however, indicate that visibility on Intel becoming an advanced-node supplier to Apple has recently improved significantly,” Kuo had said at the time.
As of now, neither Apple nor Intel have confirmed the deal. As per reports, Intel could be onboarded to produce Apple’s base M-series chips with the M7 being the first Intel-made chip for the smartphone giant.
It also remains unclear which ones of the Apple’s products would get Intel chips going forward. The iPhone-maker has been designing its own chips which are then manufactured by the TSMC.
For what its worth, this year seems to be going particularly well for Intel.
Last month, Tesla chief Elon Musk met with Lip-Bu Tan at an Intel campus in April this year. Following the meeting, Intel announced that it was joining Musk’s ambitions Terrafab AI chip project that aims to annually generate one terawatt of computational power for AI and robotics.
