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Apple is preparing to add a further $100bn to its US investment plans as chief executive Tim Cook strives to insulate the iPhone maker from Donald Trump’s trade war.

White House officials said that the Silicon Valley giant’s expanded $600bn spending commitment would be announced later on Wednesday, including a new “American manufacturing programme” to produce more of its devices and components in the US.

The pledge comes as a new wave of the US president’s planned tariffs is set to come into force on Thursday.

“President Trump’s America First economic agenda has secured trillions of dollars in investments that support American jobs and bolster American businesses,” said Taylor Rogers, the White House press secretary. “Today’s announcement with Apple is another win for our manufacturing industry that will simultaneously help reshore the production of critical components to protect America’s economic and national security.”

On the company’s earnings call last week, Cook said that the “vast majority” of Apple’s products were covered by the US administration’s ongoing Section 232 investigation into potential tariffs on chips and the products that contain them. The results of that investigation are expected soon.

Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Its shares were up nearly 4 per cent on Wednesday morning following the news.

In February, Apple said it planned to hire an additional 20,000 staff in the US over the next four years, as part of a $500bn investment in the country during Trump’s second term in office.

That figure included Apple’s day-to-day spending on US suppliers, data centres and corporate facilities, as well as new initiatives such as a manufacturing facility in Houston to build servers for artificial intelligence. In 2018, during Trump’s first term, Apple had pledged to make a $350bn “direct contribution” to the US economy.

In July it further announced a $500mn commitment to building US rare earth magnets with MP Materials, as part of the same investment plan.

Among US Big Tech companies, Apple is especially exposed to the Trump administration’s trade policies. Its efforts to diversify its production away from China to India have angered Trump, who has threatened Apple with extra tariffs unless it moves iPhone manufacturing to the US.

But supply chain experts have said the US, which hasn’t produced smartphones in any meaningful volumes for more than a decade, lacks the manufacturing expertise to assemble a device as sophisticated as an iPhone.

Moving production of its products to the US will eat into Apple’s margins, which are kept high thanks to its deeply rooted supply chains in Asia.

Apple has warned of $1.1bn in tariff-related costs in the quarter to September, assuming the current tariff rates do not change. At the same time, Apple’s sales in its most recent quarter were boosted by US consumers trying to get ahead of the new levies, which could lead to price increases for Apple’s products.

Hundreds of billions of dollars have been wiped from Apple’s market capitalisation since Trump’s “liberation day” announcements in April, amid wider concerns that the iPhone maker is falling behind in AI.

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Linda Yaccarino has been appointed as chief executive of a telehealth start-up that offers weight loss medication, weeks after her shock departure from the helm of Elon Musk’s X.

Yaccarino stepped down unexpectedly from her chief executive role at X in July, after two years attempting to claw back advertising dollars while also contending with Musk’s testy relationship with marketers. 

In a statement on Tuesday, Miami-based eMed Population Health said Yaccarino was joining the company’s mission to “make safe, effective, and sustainable chronic care accessible directly through an all-in-one, digital-first experience”. 

The little-known digital group is focused on health management for GLP-1 and GIP users, at a time when demand for anti-obesity and diabetes drugs such as Ozempic has skyrocketed.

The company said that Yaccarino was a “sought-after leader” with a “powerful presence and the undeniable ability to negotiate new partnerships [and] lead and drive transformational change”. 

Yaccarino’s departure from X came several months after the social media company was acquired by the billionaire entrepreneur’s artificial intelligence start-up xAI, in a move that insiders say sidelined her internally. 

A Madison Avenue veteran, Yaccarino risked many of her relationships in the advertising industry when she publicly backed X’s crusade to sue multiple brands and a marketing trade body on antitrust grounds, arguing that they had colluded to boycott the platform. 

While some brands returned to the platform as a result, helping to boost X’s sales numbers, others in the industry complained privately that they felt pressured to return. Yaccarino repeatedly denied the characterisation that she strong-armed marketers to spend on the platform while in the role. 

Meanwhile, relations between Musk and Yaccarino soured over time, according to four people familiar with the tensions. 

Musk felt Yaccarino had failed to be transparent about the company’s status with advertisers and put a gloss on reality, the people said. About a year into her time at X, he pressured her to more quickly restore the platform to financial health, giving her ultimatums, the people said. 

Once Musk returned his focus to X after his work at US President Donald Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency came to an end, he also started making unilateral decisions that blindsided her, some of the people said.

Nevertheless, Yaccarino, a self-proclaimed advocate of “free speech”, remained publicly loyal to her former boss throughout her X tenure.

“The healthcare industry has been disrupted by technology, but not yet completely transformed by it,” Yaccarino said in a statement on Tuesday. “There is an opportunity to combine technology, lifestyle, and data in a new powerful way through the digital channels that impact consumers directly in ways that have never been done before.” 

She added that eMed was “well-positioned” to be a “tenacious leader” that would reshape the space. 

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Booming AI demand helped Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company to its highest quarterly net profit, but the world’s largest chip manufacturer gave a more cautious outlook, citing risks from US tariffs and foreign exchange volatility.

TSMC reported NT$398.3bn (US$13.5bn) in net earnings on Thursday for the second quarter, a 60.7 per cent jump year-on-year, along with a 39 per cent jump in revenues to NT$933.8bn. Chief executive CC Wei attributed the record results to “continued robust demand” for AI and high-performance computing applications.

The company said it expected revenues to increase by another 38 per cent year-on-year in the current quarter and raised its growth forecast for the full year to 30 per cent. But that outlook implies a revenue contraction in the final quarter of 2025.

“We become more conservative,” Wei said. TSMC said it was not seeing any change in customer demand so far, but pointed to the risk that US tariff policies could affect consumers and that the weakening US dollar could undermine growth and profitability.

The cautious outlook comes after ASML, the world’s sole supplier of the lithography machines needed for making cutting-edge chips, said on Wednesday that the impact of US President Donald Trump’s tariff policies was less negative than expected. It also issued guidance more cautious than analysts had expected.

The rapid appreciation of the New Taiwan dollar, which has gained 12 per cent against the US dollar this year, is already eating into TSMC’s profitability. Nearly all of the company’s revenues are in US dollars, while 75 per cent of its cost of goods sold is incurred in its home country’s currency.

TSMC forecast its gross margin would decrease to a level between 55.5 and 57.5 per cent from 58.6 per cent in the second quarter, as costs from the expansion of new plants in the US and the less favourable exchange rate took their toll.

Earlier this year, TSMC raised its US investment plans from a previous commitment of $65bn to a total $165bn. TSMC expects the cost of successively bringing the new capacity online would dilute its gross margin by 2 to 4 percentage points annually for five years, beginning with this year’s profit margins.

But the near-term effect of currency fluctuations weighs at least as heavily. Compared with the exchange rate of NT$32.5 to the dollar expected by the company for the second quarter in April, the NT dollar had appreciated by another 4.4 percentage points, diluting the gross margin by 180 basis points. This was partially offset by higher utilisation of its fabrication plants, or fabs, TSMC said.

For the third quarter, Taiwan’s currency was expected to appreciate by another 6.6 percentage points sequentially, said chief financial officer Wendell Huang. This “will negatively impact our third-quarter revenue and reduce our gross margin by about 260 basis points”, he added.