It sounds so good, doesn’t it?
After Apple CEO Tim Cook met with US President Donald J. Trump, Cook announced: “We are bullish on the future of American innovation, and we’re proud to build on our long-standing US investments with this $500 billion commitment to our country’s future. We’ll keep working with people and companies across this country to help write an extraordinary new chapter in the history of American innovation.”
Trump smooched back on Truth Social: “APPLE HAS JUST ANNOUNCED A RECORD 500 BILLION DOLLAR INVESTMENT IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. THE REASON, FAITH IN WHAT WE ARE DOING, WITHOUT WITCH, THEY WOULD’NT BE INVESTING TEN CENTS. THANK YOU TIM COOK AND APPLE!!!”
(All the caps and typos are original, by the way.)
So, what’s not to like about Apple’s plans to hire 20,000 employees over the next four years? Well, a lot. You see, we’ve heard this same song and dance before.
This isn’t the first time Apple has made such promises. In 2018, during the first Trump administration, Apple pledged to create 20,000 new jobs as part of a $350 billion investment in the US economy. Then in 2021, with Joseph R. Biden Jr. in the White House, Apple once more promised 20,000 new jobs as part of a $430 billion investment. Do you begin to detect a pattern here?
This is now the third time, Apple has promised 20,000 more jobs.
A big part of the 2021 promise was that Apple would build a new campus and engineering hub in North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park. Didn’t happen. Apple never even broke dirt for the project — and now says it will be at least four more years before it starts building a new campus.
That will be just in time for King Donald the First’s crowning (or a new President, if we get our act together). Be that as it may, I expect Apple to keep promising more investments and, yes, more jobs. After all, it draws positive headlines.
The reality is that since Apple first promised 40,000 new jobs, it has added about 30,000 or so. This came after a slight Apple employment dip in 2023.
Now, new jobs are always welcome — especially, since these days, the unemployment rate has been edging upward. And that’s before Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) started taking a chainsaw to government employment. You can expect unemployment to return to the highs it saw when Trump was last President, shortly.
If you’re in the tech industry, things have been even worse. According to Crunchbase’s tally, “at least 95,000 workers at U.S.-based tech companies were laid off in mass job cuts in 2024…and the cuts have continued into 2025.
So, while I’m cynical about Apple’s claims, I will give the execs at Apple’s headquarters at Apple Park credit for actually boosting employment.
After all, as Paul Farnsworth, President of the top tech job site Dice, told me: “Apple has spent years hiring engineers and researchers tasked with helping the company develop an AI strategy that aligns with its broader corporate goals.”
Andrea Derler, principal of research and value at Visier, the enterprise human-resources company, added in an e-mail: “This initiative reflects Apple’s clear growth strategy and provides a glimpse into the future in which human skills such as creativity, curiosity, courage, compassion and communication will be key amidst the AI revolution.” Defer continued: “Skills churn is very high in the IT field. The lag between newly emerging tech skills gaps and existing talent can’t only be solved with hiring external talent because it’s expensive. This is where upskilling and reskilling existing talent becomes critical to solving the AI talent gap.”
But will Apple be hiring or training new AI-savvy staffers?
“Although Apple seemed to hold back on AI investment while its rivals rushed ahead with big, splashy investments in data centers and AI teams, Tim Cook’s recent announcement of a $500 billion commitment to manufacturing AI servers and other initiatives hints at accelerating AI expenditure, which will inevitably include personnel hiring,” Farnsworth said.
I’m not convinced. Sure, Apple will invest in AI. But Cook and company don’t seem to want to join Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI in the race to be the first to create truly useful generative AI. Instead, recent Apple leaks about its AI plans make it sound like what Apple wants to do is improve its iPhone and other end-user clients such as Siri with AI. Whether Apple or someone else ends up making the large language model (LLM) that powers its clients doesn’t seem that important to Apple.
So, I don’t see the $500 billion/20,000 jobs announcement as big news. It’s just business as usual for Apple. If you look closer, you’ll also see that some of these “new” AI investments aren’t really Apple’s at all.
Take, for example, the company’s latest investment plans for a Houston server production factory to be operated by Apple “and partners.” That partner is almost certainly Hon Hai Precision Industry, aka Foxconn, for an already announced AI server research and development center in Houston.
Foxconn, where have we heard that name before? Oh, right! Back in 2018, Trump and Foxconn announced a $10-billion deal with 13,000 jobs for a new factory complex in Wisconsin.
Guess what happened? Next to nothing. Today, the “Eighth Wonder of the World” is a local joke with no more than 1,000 employees. It appears, you can rent what is at the heart of the site for a banquet if you want.
So, yeah, Apple is hiring more people. That’s great. Keep up the good work. But, please, this is not Big News. Nor is it a sign that Apple is going all-in on AI. It’s not. It’s just another day of Apple trying to make a buck.
Psssst, wanna buy an iPhone?
This story originally appeared on Computerworld
