Foxconn and OpenAI Forge Billion-Dollar AI Hardware Partnership

Foxconn, the Taiwanese electronics giant best known as Apple's primary iPhone assembler, is making a strategic pivot into AI infrastructure. The company announced a partnership with OpenAI to co-design and manufacture specialized hardware for AI data centers in the United States. This collaboration represents a significant expansion beyond Foxconn's traditional consumer electronics manufacturing.

The deal focuses on solving operational challenges in AI data centers during their critical initial months of deployment. Foxconn will invest between $1 billion to $5 billion to scale U.S. production capabilities, targeting output of 2,000 server racks weekly by 2026. The partnership covers server racks, power systems, cooling solutions, and cabling - the unglamorous but vital backbone of AI computation.

While no purchase agreements are finalized, OpenAI gains early access to evaluate Foxconn's new systems. The MOVE comes as AI companies scramble to secure infrastructure capable of supporting increasingly complex models. For Foxconn, this marks a deliberate diversification into what Chairman Young Liu calls "the industrial revolution of our time."