From A.I. to Chips, Big Tech Is Getting What It Wants From Trump

Before President Trump returned to the White House in January, the titans of the tech industry went all out to win him over with inauguration donations and pilgrimages to Mar-a-Lago. Yet upon taking office, President Trump vowed to continue a fight to break up Meta, imposed tariffs that would raise the costs of Apple’s supply chains and restricted the exports of artificial intelligence chips from Nvidia and other chip makers. It seemed that the tech industry’s efforts to woo the president would not pay off. Now, however, the biggest tech companies have gotten almost everything they wanted from President Trump. Since the summer, he has eliminated many limits on A.I. chip exports, fast-tracked the building of data centers that power A.I. development and pushed legislation that gave government approval to a type of cryptocurrency. President Trump signed an executive order to kill A.I. restrictions set by states and greenlighted sales of a more powerful Nvidia chip to America’s top rival, China. “The conservative party stands for the free market and not picking winners and losers,” said Isabel Sunderland, who works on technology policy at Issue One, a nonpartisan political advocacy group, “yet what we’ve seen so far in the Trump administration is an administration that has picked the tech industry to win in ways that is contrary to his own base.”