Apple and Intel have reached a preliminary chip-making agreement after more than a year of talks.
Intel could make chips for some Apple devices, but the exact products are still not clear.
The Trump administration’s Intel stake helped push the talks forward and is now worth $56.5 billion.
Intel stock jumped 14%, while the S&P 500 crossed 7,400 for the first time.
Live Reporting
19:45Tech earnings and jobs data lift markets as oil rises after Hormuz clash
Major U.S. stock indexes are heading for weekly gains as companies keep reporting stronger earnings, with tech results doing most of the heavy lifting.
The Nasdaq is on pace to rise 4% this week after upbeat earnings from major tech names. The S&P 500 is set to add about 2%, which would give it a sixth straight winning week. The Dow Jones Industrial Average is trailing the other two indexes, with a weekly gain of just 0.2%.
The latest jobs report also helped the market. The Bureau of Labor Statistics said nonfarm payrolls increased by 115,000 last month. That was more than double the 55,000 jobs economists surveyed by Dow Jones had expected.
The unemployment rate stayed at 4.3%, matching forecasts.
Oil moved higher after fresh fighting between the U.S. and Iran in the Strait of Hormuz. West Texas Intermediate crude futures rose 1% to about $95 per barrel.
Both sides said the other side fired first. U.S. Central Command said American forces stopped Iranian attacks that it described as unprovoked, then carried out self-defense strikes while three U.S. Navy destroyers were moving through the waterway.
In a Truth Social post Thursday night, President Donald Trump said there was “no damage done to the three Destroyers, but great damage done to the Iranian attackers.”
Trump also reportedly said the ceasefire remains in place. He described the strikes on Iranian targets as “just a love tap,” whatever that even means.
18:00Trump brings Apple into Intel’s comeback as stock hits record high
President Donald Trump’s push to rebuild Intel’s manufacturing business has now pulled in Apple, giving the chipmaker its biggest outside customer win yet as its stock jumps to a record.
Apple and Intel have reached a preliminary deal for Intel to make some of the chips used in Apple devices, according to people familiar with the matter.
The two companies had been in serious talks for more than a year, and they reached a formal agreement in recent months. Bloomberg News first reported the talks on Tuesday.
It is still not clear which Apple products will use chips made by Intel. Apple ships more than 200 million iPhones every year, along with millions of iPads and Mac computers.
For Intel Chief Executive Lip-Bu Tan, the deal lands right at the center of his turnaround plan. Intel has two main businesses: designing its own chips and making chips for outside customers through Intel Foundry.
Both had been struggling for years before Lip-Bu took over last spring and promised to rebuild the company.
The Trump administration helped set up this moment last summer when it converted nearly $9 billion in federal grants into Intel stock, giving the U.S. government a 10% stake in the chipmaker. That stake is now worth $56.5 billion, a gain of $47.6 billion in less than eight months.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick also spent the past year meeting with top tech executives, including Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook, SpaceX Chief Elon Musk, and Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang, to push them toward Intel. With Apple now in, Intel has signed partnerships with all three.
Trump also made the case directly to Tim during a White House meeting, according to people familiar with the matter.
“I like Intel,” Trump said in January. He said the government had made “tens of billions of dollars” from the Intel deal, and argued that Washington’s backing helped bring major partners into the company.
“As soon as we went in, Apple went in, Nvidia went in, a lot of smart people went in,” Trump said.
Nvidia, the world’s largest chip company, invested $5 billion in Intel in September. The two companies also announced a partnership for Intel to build custom data center CPUs for Nvidia.
Last month, Elon and Intel announced a plan to build a chip manufacturing plant in Texas as part of Elon’s Terafab project, which is meant to produce chips for Tesla, xAI, and SpaceX.
Intel stock surged another 14% to its highest level on record. The S&P 500 also climbed above 7,400 for the first time ever, leaving the index up 17.2% since March 30 and adding about $10 trillion in market value in 29 trading days.
What to know
Trump’s Intel push has turned into an Apple manufacturing deal, a massive government paper gain, and a record rally for Intel stock.
