> Apple has no alternative, so no reason to give Apple exclusive access

Likely billions of reasons. It's likely Apple pays a significant premium to get that capacity.

AMD might not even mind this arrangement. Apple is essentially funding these die shrinks and AMD benefits down the road.

> AMD might not even mind this arrangement. Apple is essentially funding these die shrinks and AMD benefits down the road.

Agree with that. AMD is doing amazingly well with just architectural improvements for Zen 3, so I’d bet they’re plenty happy to just let everyone else work out the kinks in 5nm before they hop on in a year or so.

Apple is the one company that has proven itself as extremely capable of going more vertical when it is unhappy with its suppliers. This could be a case where if they don’t fulfill apple’s requests, they could lose Apple completely long term.

Apple isn't going to be replacing TSMC. It would take a few hundred billion dollars of investment at best.

Apple has deep enough pockets. They could stomach it.

There is absolutely no way Apple would build their own foundry. You are talking about a yearly investment of five to ten billion dollars, not to mention how long it'd take to actually make it production ready.

Technical problems aside, Apple's stakeholders would fire the entire board if they approved something like that.

I don’t think shareholders would be very happy to have that money spent on capex instead of paying dividends.

I'm not convinced the advantage it might or might not conter would be worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

This.

Nobody thought Apple would make its own CPUs (SoCs, really.)

Apple is going vertical.

Apple is vertical in design (IP, software) not manufacturing.

As far as I know, Apple doesn't manufacture anything. All manufacturing is outsourced. So it isn't likely that they will want to build a fab for several 10's of billions of dollars even thought they probably could.

Or, use all that Apple money and build more capacity. Perhaps even try to get money out of the US federal government in exchange for an agreement to build new factories in the lower 48.

TSMC has announced they will build a 10nm fab in Arizona. But strategically speaking, Taiwan has an interest in keeping the latest and greatest fabs in Taiwan. It’s an incentive to keep the US invested in their defense.

You don't need latest, and greatest process to make chips for missiles.

Sure, but you might need it to keep several trillion dollars of GDP afloat and ensure economic stability, which is a precursor for national security.

And a good incentive now that Intel loses ground slowly.