When Texas Instruments announced a $60 billion manufacturing megaproject in July, it was a bold bet that companies would want to mass produce foundational microchips on U.S. soil. In August, Apple vowed to do just that.
During the same Oval Office press conference where President Donald Trump announced a 100% tariff on chips from companies not manufacturing in the U.S., Apple CEO Tim Cook upped his companies’ U.S. spending commitment to $600 billion over the next four years, up from an original $500 billion announcement in February.
Part of that spending, Cook said, will go toward making “critical foundation semiconductors” for iPhones and other devices at Texas Instruments’ new chip fabrication plants in Utah and Texas.
In July, CNBC became the first news organization to see the inside of TI’s newest fab in Sherman, Texas. There, full production is on schedule to start by the end of 2025. It’s one of seven new factories the chipmaker is building in the U.S. to provide chips to major customers like Nvidia, Ford Motor, Medtronic and SpaceX.
Although Texas Instruments doesn’t make the world’s most advanced chips, its essential components are found almost everywhere, from smartphones to the graphics processing units powering generative AI.
“If you have anything that plugs into the wall, or has a battery in it, or has a cord in it, you probably carry more than one TI chip in it,” said Mohammad Yunus, TI’s senior VP of technology and manufacturing.
“The worry is their end customers. Like in the wake of tariff uncertainty, they don’t know what to expect. Are they stockpiling?” said Stacy Rasgon, senior analyst at Bernstein Research.
It remains to be seen whether demand will remain high once tariff uncertainties calm. Still, shares did recover some ground in August.
“I would position them as more of a tariff winner than a tariff loser,” said Timothy Arcuri, managing director at UBS. Arcuri said TI’s U.S. foundry will allow it to undercut the pricing of its rivals’ Taiwan-made chips.
The market for TI’s chips, however, is not a guarantee. After TI had trouble keeping up with demand during the chip shortage in 2020, Arcuri said TI’s share of the analog market “fell off a cliff.” It went from a high of 19.8% in 2020 to a low of 14.7% in 2024, according to UBS.
TI’s $60 billion megaproject includes four fabs in Sherman, Texas, one in Richardson, Texas, and two in Lehi, Utah. The new fabs will give TI five times the capacity it has today, Yunus told CNBC.
“They’re making a big bet on the fact that they regain share and that demand comes rocketing back,” Arcuri said. “If you don’t regain that share, it’s hard to justify building this much capacity.”
SM1 and SM2, the first two of four new chip fabrication plants being built by Texas Instruments in Sherman, Texas, shown on July 24, 2025.
Graham Merwin
Ramping to 300mm
While TI is well known for its graphing calculators, the company is also responsible for helping revolutionize the electronics industry. In 1958, TI engineer Jack Kilby filed the first patent for an integrated circuit. That paved the way for miniaturizing chips by building all the components of a circuit, not just the transistors, directly into a single piece of silicon.
The majority of TI’s business today comes from automotive and industrial customers that buy the company’s analog and embedded chips. Analog chips process signals like sound, light and pressure, like the temperature on a thermostat or voltage on power management chips that keep electronics safe when plugged in. Embedded chips are typically signal processors and microcontrollers for operating everyday devices, like telling the toaster to ding, the dishwasher to end a cycle or anti-lock brakes to engage.
Unlike the costly bleeding edge 2 and 3 nanometer chips made by giants like TSMC, TI’s chips are made on cheaper, legacy nodes: 45 to 130 nanometers.
That size “is the sweet spot for analog and embedded because they provide the right performance, the power, the voltage that our portfolio needs,” Yunus said.
While each TI chip costs about $0.40, according to Arcuri, they play crucial supporting roles for the world’s most advanced technologies. In a new partnership with Nvidia, for example, TI is developing a chip to drive efficiency in power-hungry data centers.
In 2009, TI made another bold move to help bring the cost of its chips down further. It opened the world’s first 300 millimeter fab for analogchips, re-purposing a memory fab from Qimonda after the chipmaker went bankrupt in the financial crisis.
“That’s what really was the catalyst for TI to have such a cost advantage,” Arcuri said.
The new wafer size gives TI “tremendous cost efficiency” because 300mm can fit “2.3 times more chips in it versus a 200mm wafer,” Yunus said. TI’s been closing and selling off some of its 200mm fabs, and all of its seven new fabs will produce on 300mm wafers.
Texas Instruments senior VP of technology and manufacturing Mohammad Yunus talks to CNBC’s Katie Tarasov in the first of TI’s four new chip fabrication plants in Sherman, Texas, on July 24, 2025.
Graham Merwin
Global supply, Texas growth
TI told CNBC it’s the country’s biggest analog and embedded semiconductor manufacturer, selling tens of billionsof chips each year. About 60% of revenue comes from customers based outside the U.S., with China making up about 20%.
About 75% of TI’s capital spend happens in the U.S., but it also makes chips abroad at fabs in Germany, Japan and China, the company told CNBC. It does testing and assembly in Mexico, Taiwan, the Philippines and Malaysia, where it’s spending $3 billion on two new sites, one of which is now in production.
TI’s global footprint is a benefit in the “dynamic situation” of tariffs right now, Yunus said.
“Our manufacturing across 15 different sites provides us the position to be able to support our customers, no matter where they are and in any political or economic environment,” he said.
Although TI considered building its new sites internationally in places like Singapore, the company ultimately settled on Sherman, Texas. The small city 65 miles north of Dallas has a population of just 50,000 people. It’s also home to a GlobalWafers factory. The Taiwan-based company manufactures the bare silicon wafers that chips, including TI’s, are made on.
Sherman Mayor Shawn Teamann said the city is now “the hub of the Silicon Prairie.”
Teamann’s grandfather worked alongside Kilby at TI in the 1950s. TI first came to Sherman in 1966, but when it announced plans to close its outdated 150mm fab, the city enticed TI to stay with incentives like tax breaks and water discounts.
The plan worked, and in 2021, TI announced it would stay in Sherman with acampus of new 300mm fabs. Now, the first of four 300mm fabs is complete in Sherman. Teamann said the 300mm project has more than doubled the city’s rate of population growth since it was announced in 2021.
At the state level, Gov. Greg Abbott has long offered incentives to chip companies willing to build in the state, from low taxes to the $1.4 billion Texas CHIPS Act passed in 2023.
Samsung is the other chip giant in Texas since 1996. The South Korean company is building a $17 billion advanced chip fab near Austin. That’s also where Apple, Amazon and AMD design many of their chips. Other chip companies in Texas include Infineon, NXP, X-Fab, Micron, GlobalFoundries, and tool supplier Applied Materials.
Water, power, workers
Making chips takes an immense amount of water, and about a quarter of Texas is in drought.
Luckily, Sherman has water rights to nearby Lake Texoma.
“It was about acquiring more rights, ramping up our production and being able to provide for the mass quantities of water it takes to run a semiconductor facility,” said Teamann, adding that the fab has almost doubled the amount of water Sherman uses.
TI will use about 1,700 gallons of water per minute when the new Sherman fab is complete, with plans to recycle at least 50% of that, Yunus said.
Chip manufacturing is also a power hungry process, so it helps that Sherman has a power plant that recently increased capacity. TI’s new Sherman fab will run entirely on renewable energy, said Yunus, adding that making chips on 300mm wafers also helps with energy efficiency.
“You use pretty much the same amount of energy but produce 2.2 to 2.3 times more chips,” he said.
Texas’ uniquely independent grid largely cuts the state off from borrowing power across state lines. In 2021, that grid failed during an extreme winter storm, causing at least 57 deaths and halting production at chipmakers like Samsung and NXP. TI told CNBC it maintained “critical operations.”
“We built redundancy into this facility,” Yunus said. “We have multiple transmission lines that feed power into the site. We also have large diesel storage tanks that we’re able to use, and generators that can continue to power the site for a few days.”
Highly skilled chip engineers are another scarce resource. It’s a talent pipeline that’s been stymied by the dramatic decline of U.S. global semiconductor manufacturing. The U.S. went from holding a 37% share of the market in 1990 to just 10% in 2022, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association.
But TI has developed partnerships with various universities, community colleges and the military to fill the talent gap necessary to fill the roles at its Sherman fab.
“There’s a lot of younger people moving to the area. I actually think it’s going to be easier for them to get the talent now than it would have been 5 to 10 years ago,” Arcuri said.
With the full $60 billion project, TI said it expects to create 60,000 U.S. jobs, but the company could not give an expected completion date when asked for one.
“It’s hard to predict when exactly that will take off,” Yunus said. “We’re hopeful that we’ll continue to build out at a pretty brisk pace, but it really depends on the market.”
Watch the video for an in-depth look at TI’s first completed fab in Sherman: https://www.cnbc.com/video/2025/08/22/apple-will-make-chips-at-texas-instruments-60-billion-us-project.html
It was a terrible start to November on Wall Street. The tech-heavy Nasdaq sank just over 3% in its worst weekly performance since early April. The S & P 500 fell 1.6% for the week. Both stock measures broke three-week winning streaks.This week’s market decline, which followed a strong October, can be chalked up to two reasons. First, investors grew concerned about the eye-watering valuations of stocks tied to artificial intelligence. Case in point: Nvidia lost its $5 trillion market cap designation in a weekly loss of 7%. The weakness in Nvidia was exacerbated by the realization that China would not be opening back up in a meaningful way for the powerhouse of AI chips. While management has not included China sales in its outlook for months, many investors still thought it could happen. Still, we maintain our long-held “own it, don’t trade” thesis on Nvidia. .SPX .IXIC 5D mountain S & P 500 and Nasdaq weekly performance Second, there were emerging signs that the government shutdown, now the longest in U.S. history, was starting to harm the economy. Job cuts last month reached their highest levels for any October in 22 years, according to Thursday’s reading from outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. A day later, the latest monthly consumer sentiment survey from the University of Michigan registered nearly its worst reading ever. These reports from private organizations have taken on added importance since the shutdown, which started on Oct. 1 and has delayed most government economic data. During this week of market turmoil, we executed three trades. On Monday, we added to our Starbucks position. The stock has taken a beating with other restaurant names on fears of a weakening consumer. In this case, we think the decline is overblown. After all, the turnaround story under CEO Brian Niccol remains strong. “With shares trading back to their ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs lows in early April, we see this recent weakness as an opportunity to slowly scoop up more,” Jeff Marks, the Investing Club’s director of portfolio analysis, wrote in a trade alert. “Niccol has embarked on an ambitious plan to bring back the coffeehouse atmosphere and fix its stores through a new operating and staffing model called Green Apron Service . It’s taken a few quarters, but the turn has finally started.” The Club also snapped up more Boeing stock Tuesday. Shares dropped significantly after the aircraft maker’s earnings report last week, caused by a larger-than-expected charge on its 777X program. Yes, the quarter was a frustrating setback. But the decline presented a great opportunity for long-term investors like us. “The turnaround under Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg is still progressing nicely, driven by better execution on its 737 program,” Marks wrote in a trade alert. “With production moving from 38 airplanes per month to 42 — then eventually 47 and 52 under FAA guidance in the future — Boeing’s ability to make and deliver more planes will lead to strong free cash flow generation in the years ahead.” The market’s pullback Thursday gave us a chance to buy more GE Vernova stock. Shares have tumbled as AI-linked names have been scrutinized for their valuations. That’s because GE Vernova is one of the world’s largest producers of gas-fired turbines, which are used to create electricity and electrification products found in data centers. The company’s sales heavily benefit from the insatiable demand for more energy due to the frantic AI infrastructure race. “We are using this downturn to buy more shares since we still have a positive long-term outlook on the need for increased electricity investment,” Marks wrote in another trade alert. Eli Lilly made headlines this week. President Donald Trump on Thursday announced a GLP-1 pricing deal with Lilly and rival drugmaker Novo Nordisk that would lower prices for certain weight-loss treatments in exchange for coverage in Medicare and Medicaid programs. This was huge news for Lilly because it can expand access to Zepbound, increasing the blockbuster weight-loss drug’s total addressable market. Eli Lilly is also behind GLP-1 Mounjaro, but it was not included in the deal. That’s not the only piece of good news for Lilly. Management announced positive mid-stage trial results for its experimental amylin obesity drug. The once-a-week shot called eloralintide was shown to help patients shed pounds while maintaining muscle mass. Shares of Eli Lilly were up 7% for the week. this week. Quarterly earnings and spinoff news were also in focus. Eaton delivered a mixed third-quarter report Tuesday morning, which beat on adjusted earnings per share (EPS) but missed on revenue and organic sales. Although the headline results were uneven, the Club still found bright spots in the release. Overall segment profit and profit margin, for example, beat expectations and reached new quarterly records. DuPont posted a beat on the top and bottom line Thursday morning — less than a week after the spinoff of Qnity Electronics. Shares of DuPont slipped right after because of noise around quarterly numbers due to the split and divestiture of its Aramids business. Still, the underlying fundamentals for the new DuPont look strong, and the stock was our biggest winner on the week, up 16.5% to nearly $40. The Club downgraded shares to our 2 rating . We also adjusted our price target to $44. Solstice Advanced Materials, which recently split from Club name Honeywell , reported earnings on Thursday with no major surprises. There was a 7% topline growth, which was provided when Honeywell posted its own results just two weeks ago. Plus, it was all fairly consistent with what was said at an investor day last month. Texas Roadhouse shared a mixed earnings report Thursday night, posting better-than-expected comps despite concerns of softening consumer spending. However, higher beef prices caused the steakhouse chain to raise its commodity inflation outlook, which has weighed on Texas Roadhouse’s profitability for some time. We’re not giving up on the Club stock yet. Wall Street heard from Qnity on Thursday night, too. Not earnings, we learned about those numbers when DuPont reported, but management delivered a business update after the close, which made us hopeful of the company’s position to keep growing from secular trends like AI in the years ahead. The Club issued a buy-equivalent 1 rating on the stock and a price target of $110. Qnity stock has been volatile and closed Friday just over $92. (See here for a full list of the stocks in Jim Cramer’s Charitable Trust.) As a subscriber to the CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer, you will receive a trade alert before Jim makes a trade. Jim waits 45 minutes after sending a trade alert before buying or selling a stock in his charitable trust’s portfolio. If Jim has talked about a stock on CNBC TV, he waits 72 hours after issuing the trade alert before executing the trade. THE ABOVE INVESTING CLUB INFORMATION IS SUBJECT TO OUR TERMS AND CONDITIONS AND PRIVACY POLICY , TOGETHER WITH OUR DISCLAIMER . NO FIDUCIARY OBLIGATION OR DUTY EXISTS, OR IS CREATED, BY VIRTUE OF YOUR RECEIPT OF ANY INFORMATION PROVIDED IN CONNECTION WITH THE INVESTING CLUB. NO SPECIFIC OUTCOME OR PROFIT IS GUARANTEED.
State Street is reiterating its bullish stance on the artificial intelligence trade despite the Nasdaq’s worst week since April.
Chief Business Officer Anna Paglia said momentum stocks still have legs because investors are reluctant to step away from the growth story that’s driven gains all year.
“How would you not want to participate in the growth of AI technology? Everybody has been waiting for the cycle to change from growth to value. I don’t think it’s happening just yet because of the momentum,” Paglia told CNBC’s “ETF Edge” earlier this week. “I don’t think the rebalancing trade is going to happen until we see a signal from the market indicating a slowdown in these big trends.”
Paglia, who has spent 25 years in the exchange-traded funds industry, sees a higher likelihood that the space will cool off early next year.
“There will be much more focus about the diversification,” she said.
Her firm manages several ETFs with exposure to the technology sector, including the SPDR NYSE Technology ETF, which has gained 38% so far this year as of Friday’s close.
The fund, however, pulled back more than 4% over the past week as investors took profits in AI-linked names. The fund’s second top holding as of Friday’s close is Palantir Technologies, according to State Street’s website. Its stock tumbled more than 11% this week after the company’s earnings report on Monday.
Despite the decline, Paglia reaffirmed her bullish tech view in a statement to CNBC later in the week.
Meanwhile, Todd Rosenbluth suggests a rotation is already starting to grip the market. He points to a renewed appetite for health-care stocks.
“The Health Care Select Sector SPDR Fund… which has been out of favor for much of the year, started a return to favor in October,” the firm’s head of research said in the same interview. “Health care tends to be a more defensive sector, so we’re watching to see if people continue to gravitate towards that as a way of diversifying away from some of those sectors like technology.”
The Health Care Select Sector SPDR Fund, which has been underperforming technology sector this year, is up 5% since Oct. 1. It was also the second-best performing S&P 500 group this week.
Neurodiverse professionals may see unique benefits from artificial intelligence tools and agents, research suggests. With AI agent creation booming in 2025, people with conditions like ADHD, autism, dyslexia and more report a more level playing field in the workplace thanks to generative AI.
A recent study from the UK’s Department for Business and Trade found that neurodiverse workers were 25% more satisfied with AI assistants and were more likely to recommend the tool than neurotypical respondents.
“Standing up and walking around during a meeting means that I’m not taking notes, but now AI can come in and synthesize the entire meeting into a transcript and pick out the top-level themes,” said Tara DeZao, senior director of product marketing at enterprise low-code platform provider Pega. DeZao, who was diagnosed with ADHD as an adult, has combination-type ADHD, which includes both inattentive symptoms (time management and executive function issues) and hyperactive symptoms (increased movement).
“I’ve white-knuckled my way through the business world,” DeZao said. “But these tools help so much.”
AI tools in the workplace run the gamut and can have hyper-specific use cases, but solutions like note takers, schedule assistants and in-house communication support are common. Generative AI happens to be particularly adept at skills like communication, time management and executive functioning, creating a built-in benefit for neurodiverse workers who’ve previously had to find ways to fit in among a work culture not built with them in mind.
Because of the skills that neurodiverse individuals can bring to the workplace — hyperfocus, creativity, empathy and niche expertise, just to name a few — some research suggests that organizations prioritizing inclusivity in this space generate nearly one-fifth higher revenue.
AI ethics and neurodiverse workers
“Investing in ethical guardrails, like those that protect and aid neurodivergent workers, is not just the right thing to do,” said Kristi Boyd, an AI specialist with the SAS data ethics practice. “It’s a smart way to make good on your organization’s AI investments.”
Boyd referred to an SAS study which found that companies investing the most in AI governance and guardrails were 1.6 times more likely to see at least double ROI on their AI investments. But Boyd highlighted three risks that companies should be aware of when implementing AI tools with neurodiverse and other individuals in mind: competing needs, unconscious bias and inappropriate disclosure.
“Different neurodiverse conditions may have conflicting needs,” Boyd said. For example, while people with dyslexia may benefit from document readers, people with bipolar disorder or other mental health neurodivergences may benefit from AI-supported scheduling to make the most of productive periods. “By acknowledging these tensions upfront, organizations can create layered accommodations or offer choice-based frameworks that balance competing needs while promoting equity and inclusion,” she explained.
Regarding AI’s unconscious biases, algorithms can (and have been) unintentionally taught to associate neurodivergence with danger, disease or negativity, as outlined in Duke University research. And even today, neurodiversity can still be met with workplace discrimination, making it important for companies to provide safe ways to use these tools without having to unwillingly publicize any individual worker diagnosis.
‘Like somebody turned on the light’
As businesses take accountability for the impact of AI tools in the workplace, Boyd says it’s important to remember to include diverse voices at all stages, implement regular audits and establish safe ways for employees to anonymously report issues.
The work to make AI deployment more equitable, including for neurodivergent people, is just getting started. The nonprofit Humane Intelligence, which focuses on deploying AI for social good, released in early October its Bias Bounty Challenge, where participants can identify biases with the goal of building “more inclusive communication platforms — especially for users with cognitive differences, sensory sensitivities or alternative communication styles.”
For example, emotion AI (when AI identifies human emotions) can help people with difficulty identifying emotions make sense of their meeting partners on video conferencing platforms like Zoom. Still, this technology requires careful attention to bias by ensuring AI agents recognize diverse communication patterns fairly and accurately, rather than embedding harmful assumptions.
DeZao said her ADHD diagnosis felt like “somebody turned on the light in a very, very dark room.”
“One of the most difficult pieces of our hyper-connected, fast world is that we’re all expected to multitask. With my form of ADHD, it’s almost impossible to multitask,” she said.
DeZao says one of AI’s most helpful features is its ability to receive instructions and do its work while the human employee can remain focused on the task at hand. “If I’m working on something and then a new request comes in over Slack or Teams, it just completely knocks me off my thought process,” she said. “Being able to take that request and then outsource it real quick and have it worked on while I continue to work [on my original task] has been a godsend.”
