Silicon Valley woos Trump with cash, praise and power plays

Key topics:.Big Tech spent a record $109m lobbying as AI stakes soaredDonald Trump rewards access with policy wins on chips and AI rulesNvidia, Meta and OpenAI gain ground as lobbying and flattery pay off.Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here.By Emily Birnbaum and Maggie Eastland.Silicon Valley has learned how to succeed in Donald Trump’s Washington: Spend record amounts. Visit the White House. Flatter the president as often as you can.It’s a playbook business leaders around the world are following. But few industries have mastered it as quickly as the biggest tech companies, which need more from Washington than ever as their marquee innovation, artificial intelligence, becomes an engine for growth in the US economy and threatens to upend every part of daily life.Government relations shops for Nvidia Corp., OpenAI Inc., Meta Platforms Inc. and other firms expanded and rebranded in 2025 to better align with the president. Altogether, the biggest tech and AI companies spent $109 million on lobbying last year, topping $100 million for the first time, according to a Bloomberg News review of public disclosures, while adding Trump-friendly advocates to their ranks in the nation’s capital..Top tech executives began Trump’s second term with prominent seats at his inauguration and never left his side, donning expensive tuxes to fete Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, headlining a White House dinner on AI leadership and showing up for countless private meetings. Harking back to business moguls of the early 20th century, tech leaders like Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg even bought up DC real estate.“For many tech industry leaders, they adopted a strategy of engagement as both an offensive and defensive measure,” said Justin Sayfie, a lobbyist at Trump-allied lobbying giant Ballard Partners, which counts Amazon.com Inc., trade group Computer & Communications Industry Association and TikTok among its clients. “From the president’s perspective, it’s the most America First policy imaginable to help grow these homegrown American technology companies.”Meta led all tech companies in lobbying expenditures in 2025 with a new peak of more than $26 million to hold its place among the biggest spenders in Washington. Behind Meta were Amazon with more than $17 million and Alphabet Inc.’s Google at over $13 million, though Amazon saw a slight decrease from the previous year.With billionaire tech investor David Sacks serving as White House AI czar and Trump publicly embracing the companies’ investment plans, 2025 was the year that Silicon Valley’s priorities and the government’s AI agenda became nearly indistinguishable.Nvidia won Trump’s blessing to export its powerful H200 AI chips to China and successfully killed a chip-export provision in must-pass defense legislation in December. The US also threatened to retaliate against the European Union over EU efforts to tax American tech companies such as Meta and Google.OpenAI, Meta and venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz persuaded Trump and White House officials to issue an executive order seeking to rein in state-level AI regulations. And TikTok, which Trump sought to ban during his first term, scored a win as the president — famed for his transactional nature — helped muscle through a sale to US tech investors that’s set to close this week.Nvidia and Meta didn’t respond to requests for comment. OpenAI, Microsoft and Google declined to comment. The stakes for tech under Trump were highlighted by Nvidia, the world’s most valuable company and maker of the advanced chips powering the global AI boom. Since 2022, Nvidia’s processors have been subject to escalating US export controls, effectively locking it out of China, a market the chipmaker has identified as a $50 billion opportunity.With an eye toward getting those restrictions eased under Trump, Nvidia last year boosted its lobbying spending more than seven-fold, to $4.9 million from $640,000 in 2024. For an AI chip giant that generated $64 billion in cash from operations in fiscal 2025, those costs are a drop in the bucket compared to the future sales it sees in China..After taking office, Trump, Sacks and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick emerged as the administration’s leading champions for Nvidia’s bid to return to the Chinese market — a massive shift formalized this month over strenuous objections from national security hawks in Washington.That decision was prompted in no small part by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s entreaties to Trump. The two men met in January 2025, Huang has said, after Lutnick offered to make the connection. The Nvidia chief has parlayed that into a relationship built on after-hours phone calls, effusive compliments and chats about an upcoming White House UFC fight.“Oftentimes we’ll be talking about things late in the night, and I’m kind of ready for bed and he would have gone for several more hours,” Huang said in an interview with TIME. “I’ve never met anybody with such incredible work ethic.”Trump in turn has praised Nvidia’s prowess. In September, he joked that the company was “taking over the world.” Asked by a Bloomberg reporter how often he’s in Washington, Huang responded: “Whenever President Trump would like me to be here.”Huang is far from the only tech leader lavishing Trump with praise. Advanced Micro Devices Inc. CEO Lisa Su thanked him for “the incredible work that your administration has done to support the semiconductor industry.” Her company, a chipmaking rival to Nvidia that also benefitted from the China export controls reprieve, spent $4.85 million on lobbying in 2025, an 80% increase from the prior year..OpenAI CEO Sam Altman — who compared Trump to Adolf Hitler in 2016 — described him in September as a “pro-business, pro-innovation president.” Altman took center stage at the White House with Trump a day after his inauguration to herald plans for the company’s Stargate project, kicking off a slew of major AI commitments in 2025 from tech companies.Now valued at $500 billion, closely held OpenAI is counting on Trump to help clear the regulatory path for hundreds of billions of dollars in AI infrastructure, including data centers and power plants. In 2025, it spent nearly $3 million on lobbying, up almost 70% from $1.76 million the year before.ASML Holding NV, the Dutch maker of extreme ultraviolet lithography tools used to produce AI chips, increased its Washington spending by about 22%, to $1.5 million in 2025. The company’s technology is considered a key chokepoint in restricting China’s domestic chip manufacturing capabilities and keeping the Asian nation behind the US and its allies.The CEOs who stood on stage with Trump at his swearing-in have landed at least some of their priorities, but their companies have all pledged enormous domestic investments in return. Trump spared Apple Inc. from sweeping US tariffs on Chinese goods after CEO Tim Cook — who cultivated close ties with the president during his first term — committed $600 billion toward domestic manufacturing and infrastructure efforts.Big Tech’s relentless public push marks a break from previous years, including through the Biden administration, when companies struggled to make inroads at the White House and kept a lower profile. Tech leaders’ embrace of Trump also represents a pivot from the distance they kept from the president during his first term, amid chagrin over his administration’s policies.Stewart Verdery, founder of lobbying firm Monument Advocacy, said there has been “both a truce and a budding relationship between the tech industry and the Trump administration.”Companies have spent millions hiring lobbyists and executives with ties to the president, including former campaign officials, White House staffers and even the one-time top lawyer for Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. Google hired Rubin Turnbull & Associates, a Florida firm that counts White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles’ daughter as one of its leaders. Microsoft Corp. hired the firm Michael Best, where former White House chief of staff Reince Priebus serves as president and chief strategist.Beyond in-house lobbyists, tech firms have put Trump allies in key executive roles. Meta last week said that former Trump adviser Dina Powell McCormick would become its new president and vice chairman. Another former Trump official, CJ Mahoney, was promoted to general counsel at Meta, and former Trump energy adviser John McCarrick was hired as OpenAI’s new head of global energy policy. In December, Intel Corp. hired Robin Colwell, a deputy director of the White House National Economic Council under Trump, as the company’s new head of government affairs, four months after the US announced plans to take a 10% equity stake in the struggling chipmaker. A meeting between Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan and Trump soon followed, at least his second with the president. Intel declined to comment but pointed to previous company statements on Colwell’s hiring.“The leaders of these companies have realized the president expects that CEOs are going to have facetime with him, that they’re going to be in his office, going to do events with him,” Verdery said. Those are only the disclosed hires and amounts spent on direct lobbying. As part of a settlement of a lawsuit over Trump’s YouTube ban following the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, Google agreed to put $22 million toward the president’s White House ballroom. Meta, Microsoft and Apple have also pledged undisclosed sums toward the $400 million ballroom project. OpenAI President Greg Brockman and his wife Anna Brockman rank among Trump’s top political donors after combining to give $25 million to his MAGA Inc. super-PAC, according to its most recent filing with the Federal Election Commission. .The coming year will test whether companies can continue to cash in on their political clout. OpenAI has asked the Trump administration to revamp a Chips Act tax credit to cut the cost of AI infrastructure, while Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told CNBC on Tuesday that Trump’s tariffs have started to “creep” into prices. Meanwhile, national security hawks kicked off 2026 by challenging Trump’s plan to allow H200 sales to China, with lawmakers advancing legislation to give Congress the power to block such approvals. And the White House has to follow through on its pledge to protect AI companies against a patchwork of state AI regulations emerging across the country. One thing is certain: it will be another banner year for tech’s lobbyists on K Street.“President Trump’s administration is an activist administration and is very aggressive on implementing and executing policies that are very important to the tech industry,” said Sayfie from Ballard. “The old saying in Washington is, ‘If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.’” .© 2026 Bloomberg L.P.

Silicon Valley woos Trump with cash, praise and power plays

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