From Houston Public Media:
Apple on Monday said the company will build a 250,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Houston by 2026.
The announcement comes as the tech giant is slated to spend more than $500 billion in the United States over the next four years and bolster “Apple Intelligence,” an in-house artificial intelligence system.
“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,” CEO Tim 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,” Cook said. “And we’ll keep working with people and companies across this country to help write an extraordinary new chapter in the history of American innovation.”
The Houston facility that will produce components for its artificial intelligence system is expected to create thousands of jobs in the area. Apple said the company is on track to hire 20,000 new employees in the next four years focused on research and development, silicon engineering, software development and machine learning.
The company on Monday announced it would work with manufacturing partners to begin production of the artificial intelligence servers in Houston later this year.
The AI servers were previously manufactured outside of the United States. The servers that 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,” according to the company.
In a post to its website on Monday, the company didn’t immediately say where the facility will be located within Houston.
The servers were designed to be energy efficient and reduce the energy demands of Apple data centers across the country, which already run on 100 percent renewable energy, according to the company. Apple also has plans for expanding its operations in North Carolina, Iowa, Oregon, Arizona and Nevada.
