Apple Inc on Monday said that it would open an engineering hub in North Carolina, marking its first major campus on the US’ east coast as part of an increased commitment to investing domestically.
The Cupertino, California-based technology giant said that it would spend US$1 billion in the area around Raleigh Durham and Chapel Hill, known as the Research Triangle and home to other big companies that have a significant presence there, including IBM Corp, Cisco Systems Inc and GlaxoSmithKline PLC.
Apple said that it would create 3,000 jobs at the new site in machine learning, artificial intelligence and software engineering.
Photo: Reuters
Apple’s announcement is part of the iPhone maker’s planned 20 percent increase in US investments over the next five years, allocating US$430 billion in direct spending on US-based suppliers, data center investments, capital expenditures in the US and other projects, including dozens of Apple TV+ productions, and research and development on technologies such as custom silicon and 5G.
The effort would result in 20,000 new jobs, including in San Diego; Los Angeles; Boulder, Colorado; and Boston by 2026, the company said in a statement.
“At this moment of recovery and rebuilding, Apple is doubling down on our commitment to US innovation and manufacturing with a generational investment reaching communities across all 50 states,” Apple chief executive officer Tim Cook said.
Over the past three years, Apple’s investments have outpaced its original five-year goal of US$350 billion set in 2018, the company said.
However, the firm has also been growing. Its shares have gained about 200 percent since the previous investment plan was announced in January 2018, and the company is now worth more than US$2 trillion.
Apple said that it is also the US’ biggest taxpayer, having paid US$45 billion in domestic corporate income taxes in the past five years.
This week’s undoing of the TerraUSD algorithmic stablecoin and its sister token, Luna, has ramifications for all of crypto. First, there is the immediate impact: The rapid collapse of a once-popular pair of cryptocurrencies sent a ripple effect across the industry, contributing to plummeting coin prices that wiped hundreds of billions of market value from the digital-asset market and stoked worries over the potential fragility of digital-asset ventures. Then there are the knock-on effects. In addition to delivering punishing losses to individual users and investment firms, the spectacular failure of a market darling like Terra threatens to have a cooling effect
China’s biggest chipmaker has cut its outlook for the second quarter, joining a growing list of manufacturers warning about the fallout from lockdowns aimed at containing the country’s worst COVID-19 outbreak in two years. Semiconductor Manufacturing International Co (SMIC, 中芯) estimates a month-long lockdown in Shanghai could spur component shortages and logistics tangles, and erase about 5 percent of its output in the second quarter. “We are trying our best to mitigate the impact on product delivery,” SMIC Chairman Gao Yonggang (高永崗) told analysts on a call yesterday morning. “We are still assessing the actual impact as many suppliers restart their
DISRUPTIONS: The war in Ukraine, China’s lockdown measures, rising interest rates and inflation have thrown a wrench into business plans made years in advance Samsung Electronics Co is talking with foundry clients about charging as much as 20 percent more for making semiconductors this year, joining an industry-wide push to hike prices to cover rising costs of materials and logistics. Contract-based chip prices are likely to rise around 15 percent to 20 percent, depending upon the level of sophistication, people familiar with the matter said. Chips produced on legacy nodes would face bigger price hikes, while new pricing would be applied from the second half of this year, they said, adding that Samsung has finished negotiating with some clients and is in discussions with others. Samsung’s decision
material SHORTAGE: Even as workers are about to return, Quanta lacks operating supplies, while Pegatron reported its lowest revenues in 11 quarters, the companies said Taiwan’s major Apple Inc supplier cut its outlook for the second quarter, joining a growing list of manufacturers warning about the fallout from lockdowns aimed at containing China’s worst COVID-19 outbreak in two years. Quanta Computer Inc (廣達電腦), which assembles MacBooks, expects a 20 percent quarterly fall in notebook shipments and a squeeze on margins this quarter due to the lockdown, a company representative said on Friday during an earnings call. The impact from supply chain disruptions could last until the end of the year, she said. The company’s Shanghai factory has been operating under tight restrictions since the middle of last month,
RSS