The tech industry indeed works in strange ways. While Apple and Samsung are locked in a bitter legal battle all around the world, they continue to rely on each other for different components, which is kind of inevitable too. In a recent revelation, it has been found out that Apple’s A5 chips, critical for iPhone and iPad, are being made at a Samsung-owned factory in Texas.
Apple is well-known for shipping out most of it’s manufacturing work to Asian markets, particularly to Chinese suppliers. This helps it keep the costs down and make mass production possible, thanks to cheap and huge labor mass in China. However, it seems like Apple tends to keep the production of A5 chip, the critical component of iPhone and iPad devices, within it’s homeland.
And who else but Apple’s arch-rival Samsung is producing these chips! In a large factory employing thousands of employees, Samsung makes use of a $3.6 billion production line to create these chips for Apple. This enables Samsung to create about 40,000 of these components every month and the factory is apparently dedicated solely to this. The investment is considered the largest investment by a foreign company in the state of Texas, value at about $9 billion.
The location of the factory has certain strategic advantages. Samsung is able to recruit relevant personnel from the University of Texas engineering school. While both Apple and Samsung decline to comment and officially admit to this collaboration, a Samsung official from the factory did confirm that the factory produced ‘logical’ chips, A5 chip being one such chip.
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