Big Tech bet on Trump. It’s still waiting for the payoff.

At President Donald Trump’s inauguration in January, the chief executives of Google, Meta and Amazon sat front and center, broadcasting their support for the new president who had for years railed against Big Tech.

Since Trump’s announcement Wednesday of expanded tariffs on imports from almost every country in the world, those tech giants are in another front row: as targets for U.S. trade partners looking for ways to strike back at the American economy.

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On Friday, China announced retaliatory tariffs that included an especially steep tax on exports of rare earth minerals essential for the computer chips that power everything from iPhones to artificial intelligence. The European Union is preparing a wide-ranging response that could include direct hits to the largest American internet and software companies. And the industry is bracing for further fallout from abroad that could include rising energy prices, restrictive data-privacy policies and taxes on digital services.

To hit back at Trump, U.S. trade partners “will look for areas that represent American economic strength and for which there are non-American alternatives,” said one tech industry lobbyist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he feared retaliation from the administration.

“The American technology industry is at the front of that list,” the lobbyist said. “We are not a sympathetic victim.”

There is still hope in Silicon Valley that Trump will deliver deregulation at home, juice the start-up economy by allowing more mergers, and use the tariffs as a stick to beat back foreign countries’ efforts to tax and regulate American tech firms. But in the chaotic first months of his administration, the tech giants that invested in cozying up to him have yet to see such returns. Industry insiders and observers expressed growing concern that this administration may not have its interests at heart after all.

Since Trump’s election, Silicon Valley CEOs have praised him on social media, ended diversity initiatives and fact-checking practices that he opposed, and paid millions of dollars into his inauguration fund. Observers assumed the tech companies were looking to score points with the famously transactional president in the hopes he might help them.

Yet so far, Trump is forging ahead with antitrust lawsuits aiming to rein in or break up Meta, Google, Amazon and Apple. He is pursuing a deal to keep Chinese social media competitor TikTok available in the United States. And now he has launched a global trade war that is already hitting tech firms, their investors, and the personal net worth of the leaders who courted his favor.

In the two days after Trump’s tariff was announced, Apple’s stock dropped 16 percent, Meta was down 14 percent and Amazon fell 13 percent. According to estimates from Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index, Tesla CEO Elon Musk personally lost $110 billion from his net worth so far this year, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos $37.6 billion and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg $18.6 billion. Bezos is the owner of The Washington Post.

Venture capitalists and start-up founders generally cheered Trump’s win in November. They predicted a new golden age for America as the president got rid of regulations, increased military spending on drones and AI and turbocharged innovation.

The industry’s enthusiasm was rooted in a hope that Trump would treat U.S. tech as a national asset to promote rather than a corporate villain to restrain, said Adam Kovacevich, CEO of Chamber of Progress, a center-left tech trade group.

“Many, many people in the industry felt like the Biden administration went to war against them,” he said. Industry leaders had their reservations about Trump, Kovacevich added, but they felt his door would be open to them in a way Biden’s wasn’t.

Trump has delivered for the industry on a few counts already. He rolled back Biden’s executive order on artificial intelligence, which many AI companies viewed as overly focused on safety and guardrails at the expense of innovation. And he has criticized the European Union’s efforts to regulate Big Tech via the Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act.

In a February memorandum, Trump put tariffs forward as a means to fight foreign governments that have “exerted extraterritorial authority over American companies, particularly in the technology sector, hindering these companies’ success and appropriating revenues that should contribute to our Nation’s well-being, not theirs.”

Some of Trump’s supporters in the tech community suggested that the president’s approach to rebalancing world trade would eventually promote high-tech investment in the United States and said the criticism of his tariff regime is overstated. “Trump Derangement Syndrome has morphed into Tariff Derangement Syndrome,” Keith Rabois, a prominent venture capitalist who has supported Republicans, said on X.

But Trump’s picks to lead the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department’s antitrust division have signaled that they plan to largely carry forward the Biden administration’s tough approach to policing Big Tech, albeit with more leeway for mergers and acquisitions. His immigration policies pose challenges for tech firms thirsty for foreign talent.

And now his tariffs are creating uncertainty that industry insiders say hampers companies trying to plan their next moves. The market chaos also makes it less likely that tech start-ups will go public, depriving venture capitalists of making money on their investments.

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Tariff pain

In the tech community, the response is “pretty universal disdain for the tariffs and the way they’ve been rolled out,” said Ryan Petersen, CEO of Flexport, a tech platform that helps companies manage their supply chains.

“It’s certainly not the libertarian ethos that some of them support,” he said.

While “the dust hasn’t yet settled” on Trump’s tariffs, it’s clear already that “this is going to be disruptive,” said Sean Murphy, executive vice president of policy at the Information Technology Industry Council (ITI), a trade group. The tariffs are set to raise costs not only on supply chains for device makers such as Apple, he said, but also on energy and infrastructure, which will hit software and AI giants.

“Data centers, for example, are built with steel,” Murphy said.

If companies knew the tariffs were here to stay, Kovacevich said, they could adapt by shifting production between countries. But so far, they’re a moving target, making long-term planning a fool’s errand.

For example, many U.S. tech companies had moved the production of hardware out of China into countries such as Vietnam and India, because of tariffs on China set during Trump’s first administration. But the new round of Trump tariffs hit those countries hard, meaning imports of iPhones and gaming consoles will become more costly. On Friday, Nintendo announced it would delay taking preorders for its new game console as it studied the tariffs’ impact.

And while the tariffs exempted computer chips, that offered little comfort to the tech industry. Data center GPUs, the kinds of chips most commonly used for AI, aren’t included under the exemptions, according to a list released by the White House. And on Thursday, Trump said a new set of tariffs was being prepared specifically for semiconductors.

The tariffs will increase prices on the already expensive high-end computer chips that are vital for the development and running of the AI algorithms behind products like ChatGPT. That could hamper the U.S. effort to win a generational race against China for technological supremacy.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said AI was core to Trump’s plan to reform the U.S. economy because it would help lower the cost of producing goods domestically. “We just had to wait for the AI technology boom to be here now to let us compete with all that cheap labor all around the world,” Lutnick said Thursday on Fox News.

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Retaliation

Then there’s the uncertainty over how U.S. trade partners will respond – and an expectation that at least some of them will target tech firms.

One of Silicon Valley’s biggest hopes for the Trump administration was that it would use trade policy to deter Europe and other countries from taxing and aggressively regulating U.S. tech companies, said Doreen Edelman, chair of global trade and national security at the law firm Lowenstein Sandler. It’s an idea Trump and Vice President JD Vance have often embraced.

But while such hopes haven’t been extinguished, Edelman said, the sweeping scope of this week’s tariffs has damped them significantly, especially since Trump sent mixed signals that suggest he might see tariffs as an end in themselves, rather than a means to removing barriers.

For U.S. trade partners, she said, the tariffs have “opened up the door for creative thinking” on pushing back. That kind of thinking is exactly what tech giants, which rely heavily on access to foreign markets, don’t want.

E.U. officials have been debating putting tariffs on digital services Europeans buy from U.S. tech companies in response to Trump’s tariffs, The Washington Post reported Tuesday. Europeans buy billions of dollars of digital products from U.S. tech companies every year, ranging from Google cloud storage to Netflix video streaming subscriptions.

Officials from some countries, including France, are pushing for an aggressive response that could target Big Tech in particular, The Post reported.

Musk’s X, meanwhile, could be hit with upward of $1 billion in E.U. fines, the New York Times reported Thursday – a politically symbolic move given Musk’s close Trump ties.

Elsewhere, Trump’s tariffs have already led to retaliation against U.S. tech companies.

Minutes after Trump’s first round of tariffs against China went into effect in early February, the Chinese government announced an antitrust investigation into search giant Google.

One hopeful sign for tech leaders came when India earlier this year removed a 6 percent tax on digital ad sales, which was instituted in 2016 and known colloquially as the “Google tax.”

But that didn’t stop Trump on Wednesday from imposing an across-the-board 26 percent tariff on India, one of the harshest of the measures announced by the president.

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Regulations at home

It isn’t just foreign regulators taking aim at Big Tech under Trump.

Trump’s Justice Department has forged ahead with efforts to break up Google after a judge ruled it has an illegal monopoly over internet search. The Biden administration proposed Google be forced to split off its Chrome browser, a demand Trump’s lawyers doubled down on in a filing last month.

“It feels like we’re getting close to the point of like where we’re actually gonna start seeing if this cozying up [to Trump] is gonna pay off in any way,” said Katie Harbath, a former policy director of Meta who handled election issues at the social media giant.

On Wednesday, Zuckerberg went to the White House hoping to lobby Trump to drop the FTC’s antitrust lawsuit, according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss company discussions. Meta spokesman Andy Stone said in a statement, “We regularly meet with policymakers to discuss issues impacting competitiveness, national security, and economic growth.”

Trump’s Republican FTC Chair, Andrew Ferguson, told tech news site The Verge on Wednesday that he’d be “very surprised” if Trump asked him to drop a major antitrust suit but would “obey lawful orders.”

So far, the tech leaders who backed Trump have mostly kept their complaints private, not wanting to make themselves targets for his ire. “There is a fear in every industry of criticizing the president,” said the industry lobbyist who spoke anonymously.

The tech industry’s optimism toward Trump hasn’t disappeared, ITI’s Murphy said, but “there are concerns moving forward.”

“There are still good elements of the Trump agenda,” Murphy said. “We are still very optimistic about this administration’s approach, for example, to AI, which is focused much more on opportunity” than Biden’s risk-averse approach. He also cited Trump’s executive order establishing an “investment accelerator” to take over Biden’s CHIPS program.

But Murphy said the industry is eager to see the tariffs “reversed as quickly as possible” through negotiations so that the administration can focus on “an affirmative trade agenda that really capitalizes on America’s strengths” – such as the country’s $300 billion surplus last year in digital trade.

“We’d like to put this chapter behind us,” Murphy said.