Apple’s Tim Cook and Howard Lutnick open Houston manufacturing plant

Apple CEO Tim Cook was joined by government officials, including Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick, on Thursday to open a new manufacturing facility offering free training and educational classes for businesses in Houston, Texas.

The facility is also where Apple will manufacture Mac Mini desktop computers later this year, the company said. AI servers for Apple are also assembled at a portion of the location.

“We stood up a factory, started production, and shipped the first advanced AI servers off the line, and with Mac Mini production set to begin later this year,” Cook said, adding that Apple had spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the facility.

President Donald Trump has for years pressed Apple to make its iPhone in the U.S. While the company has tried to appease the administration, it’s also worried that Trump’s proposed tariffs could snarl its business.

Apple has chosen to emphasized the things it does build in the U.S., like components, chips, and cover glass. Cook said on Thursday that Apple had sourced more than 20 billion chips from the U.S. last year and 100 million chips from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.’s facility in Arizona.

“For decades, America was the great inventor of the world’s technology, and we watched that technology be built everywhere else in the world,” Lutnick said at the ribbon cutting. “President Trump said, ‘Look, that’s got to change.'”

“We needed Apple’s commitment to build here in America, because they can uniquely, maybe, lead the charge for advanced manufacturing coming to America,” Lutnick continued.

The joint appearance comes in the final weeks of Cook’s tenure as CEO of Apple. On Sept. 1, he’ll become executive chairman, and longtime Apple hardware executive John Ternus will assume the CEO role.

Cook’s appearance with officials could be an early sign of what his future entails, as Apple said Cook would “assist with certain aspects of the company, including engaging with policymakers around the world.”

While Apple has never indicated it would manufacture a U.S. iPhone, the company has said in appearances with the Trump administration that many of its components are made in the U.S., and that it diversified its supply chain away from being entirely in China, making a proportion of U.S.-bound iPhones and Macs in India and Vietnam.

Last August, Apple introduced a $600 billion spending commitment that it called the American Manufacturing Program. Through orders, purchase commitments, and an effort to expand production capacity with several semiconductor companies, Apple said it was supporting U.S. manufacturing. It also opened a manufacturing center offering classes and training in Michigan. Classes at the Houston site will include topics like using machine learning for quality control.

Apple leaders have previously appeared with Trump officials to announce Mac Pro manufacturing and server manufacturing in the U.S., but the Mac Mini is a consumer-facing product with higher sales volumes.

In 2019, Cook appeared with Trump at the Austin, Texas factory where the $6,000 Mac Pro was assembled. Last year, in a White House appearance, Cook said Apple would make servers for Apple Intelligence outside of Houston.

The Mac Mini has never been Apple’s most popular PC, but it found a second purpose and sold out in some stores this spring as a free program called OpenClaw gained popularity among artificial intelligence enthusiasts, who found that Apple’s smallest and least expensive desktop was perfect for running AI agents.

“When I thought about a Mac Mini, I thought, OK, that’s like the computer on your desk,” Lutnick said. “And then I see Tim. He goes: ‘No, no, no.'”

Lutnick said Cook told him you can run advanced AI models on the computer, “and these things are amazing, right?”

WATCH: Apple opening a new manufacturing site in Texas