OpenAI is partnering with Taiwan’s Foxconn, the world’s largest contract electronics manufacturer, to design and build artificial intelligence data center components in the U.S., the AI startup’s latest announcement tied to its massive infrastructure development plans.

While no financial terms were disclosed, OpenAI said in Thursday’s announcement that it will have early access to evaluate the systems Foxconn produces, and the option to purchase them. The companies said the goal is to accelerate the deployment of infrastructure while securing long-term U.S. capacity.

Under the agreement, OpenAI and Foxconn will co-develop multiple generations of AI servers in parallel, while manufacturing core components like power, networking, and cooling systems at Foxconn’s U.S. facilities. The company’s website says it has factories in Wisconsin, Ohio, Texas, Virginia and Indiana.

“This partnership is a step toward ensuring the core technologies of the AI era are built here,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a statement, calling AI infrastructure a “generational opportunity to reindustrialize America.”

OpenAI has been on a dealmaking blitz of late with many of the world’s largest technology companies, and has announced spending commitments of roughly $1.4 trillion, raising concerns about whether the startup will ever generate enough profit to justify those investments. Altman said earlier this month that the company will hit $20 billion in annualized revenue by the end of this year and hundreds of billions by 2030.

Prior deals include a $100 billion announced — but unfinalized — agreement with Nvidia for the chipmaker to invest in OpenAI in phases as the company builds out infrastructure. OpenAI also has cloud partnerships with Microsoft, Google and Amazon and hefty compute buildout commitments with Oracle.

Foxconn adds a manufacturing layer, further localizing OpenAI’s supply chain and potentially speeding the pace of deployment. The company is best known for assembling Apple’s iPhones but has expanded into AI and automotive manufacturing. It builds server racks tailored for AI workloads and is a key global supplier to Nvidia, the dominant player in high-end AI chips.

“Foxconn is uniquely positioned to support OpenAI’s mission with trusted, scalable infrastructure,” said Chairman Young Liu.

But the company has a checkered history in the U.S. In 2018, Foxconn broke ground on what was supposed to be a massive factory in Wisconsin for making flat-panel displays. That project was a failure, and is now the site of an AI data center being built by Microsoft.

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OpenAI is betting a new “era” of computing will justify the company’s decision to spend billions of dollars on bespoke hardware to go with it, Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar said.

The artificial intelligence startup, best known for the ChatGPT chatbot, announced plans on Wednesday to buy iPhone designer Jony Ive’s devices startup io for about $6.4 billion. Ive’s company was founded roughly a year ago and doesn’t have a product on the market.

Friar told CNBC on Thursday that any startup as young as io was “hard to value.” But she sees an eventual return on that investment.

“You’re really betting on great people and beyond,” Friar said. “It’s not just about imagining what a new platform could look like — you’ve got to be able to craft it. You’ve got to be able to build it. You’ve got to be able to understand supply chains.”

Friar, who took the CFO job at OpenAI last summer and was formerly CEO of Nextdoor, said new devices will eventually get OpenAI’s technology in the hands of more users, and drive subscription growth and attach rates. ChatGPT last reported 500 million weekly active users, but monthly actives are higher, Friar said.

“When you start thinking about it beyond just a phone, it starts to grab the imagination,” she said. “If we can get people around the world excited to use AI, we have many ways to begin to think of a business model around that. So it could be an ongoing, bigger subscription for ChatGPT.”

Friar’s comments echo others in the tech industry who have said AI hardware could change the face of computing, and threaten the iPhone. Eddy Cue, Apple’s chief of services, said earlier this month that he believes AI devices could replace the iPhone within ten years.

While OpenAI works with Apple on an iPhone and Siri integration, Friar said the company still saw a need to have its own proprietary devices.

“We want to work with many partners. When we single-thread ourselves, we don’t think that drives max innovation,” Friar said. “We continue to work closely with Apple on their device, and we’d love to see more being done with AI — but we also want to keep sparking innovation broadly in the ecosystem.”

Friar hinted at new devices without touchscreens. She declined to give details around what exactly they might look like, pointing to the former Apple team’s secretive culture and “mystique” around products.

“As you birth this new era of AI, there’s going to be new platforms and new substrate,” she said. “We think of tech today as a little bit more around touch. We as humans, we see things, we hear things, we talk. And our models are great at that.”

WATCH: CNBC’s full interview with OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar

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