- The tech sector is bracing itself for change under a second Donald Trump presidency.
- AI regulation is likely to change under Trump, but major antitrust cases are unlikely to be impacted.
- From tariffs to visas, here’s how Trump’s presidency could affect Big Tech.
Donald Trump has won the presidency — and the tech world is waiting to see what his administration will mean for key issues such as AI regulation, immigration, antitrust cases, and mergers and acquisitions.
Trump has promised to assemble a different cabinet for his second time in the White House. His advisors are likely to include some of the business leaders that backed his campaign, not least among them one of the most powerful figures in tech: Elon Musk.
In an election-night speech, Trump showered praise on Musk, marveling at his SpaceX rockets.
“Elon, he is an amazing guy,” Trump said early Wednesday morning.
There’s a lot at stake for the sector, with a slew of companies facing antitrust battles. And with immigration top of mind for many voters, H-1B visas could be impacted, experts say, dealing a potential blow to tech companies experiencing staffing shortages amid an AI hiring frenzy.
Here’s how Trump’s second term could impact Big Tech.
On the campaign trail, Trump threatened prosecution if reelected
Though Trump has cozied up to one major tech leader — Musk — others are in his crosshairs.
While on the campaign trail, Trump threatened retribution against some tech companies, including jailing Meta’s chief, Mark Zuckerberg.
He threatened to imprison “election fraudsters,” including Zuckerberg, who has a long history with the president. It’s unclear whether Trump will follow through on his threats.
Trump also heavily criticized Google throughout his campaign, saying the tech giant was “rigged” and didn’t display positive stories about him, calling the company “very bad,” and suggesting he’d “do something” about its power.
In September, Trump escalated his feud with the company by threatening to order the Justice Department to prosecute Google “at the maximum levels” during his second term. He accused the tech giant of engaging in illegal behavior and interfering in the election with the stories it displayed on its search results page.
The Justice Department usually operates independently of the president; Trump said on the campaign trail that the criminal justice system had been weaponized against him and threatened to do the same to his political rivals.
That norm-breaking change could mean more regulatory issues for the likes of Google — if Trump makes good on his promise.
Tariffs remain the biggest question mark
Barclays warned in September that the tech industry would be one of the hardest hit by Trump’s plan for wide-ranging tariffs.
“While the new proposed tariffs would have a modest direct negative impact on corporate earnings if implemented, the second order effects from higher cost inflation and slowing economic growth would be an incremental headwind to corporate earnings and cause further pain,” the bank said.
Mark Lemley, a professor who’s the director of the Stanford Program in Law, Science & Technology, warned that Trump’s plan for huge tariffs on foreign goods could also harm tech companies during his second term.
“A Trump administration will involve a US withdrawal from the world and the imposition of giant tariffs,” Lemley told Business Insider. “That is likely to have devastating consequences for US tech companies that sell in foreign markets as well as crippling domestic consumption.”
Retail analysts told BI the industry was following the question of tariffs extremely closely.
“You can look at that in two ways,” GlobalData’s Neil Saunders said. “You can say it’s a negotiating strategy, and it won’t actually come to pass, or you can say it will come to pass, maybe in a diluted form and not that severe.”
“It’s causing a lot of nervousness,” he added.
If Trump does follow through on his campaign proposals, it would mean significant changes to the way retailers do business.
“It would be a massive upheaval to most of the cost structures for these companies,” Chris Walton, a former Target executive, said.
Given the expense of reorganizing supply chains, Walton said, large retailers are still researching their options and making any simple adjustments rather than committing early to a new strategy.
On antitrust cases, ‘most of the low-hanging fruit has already been picked’
Antitrust cases are already underway for the major Big Tech companies — including Apple, Google, Meta, and Amazon — but normally, there’s not much an incoming president could or would do to alter current cases, George Hay, an antitrust expert who’s a law professor at Cornell University, told BI.
“It’s very rare that, at the presidential level, there’s any attempt to influence the course of cases which have already been filed. Those have a life of their own,” Hay said. “They depend on the judge, the courts, the lawyers who carry on a case. It’s extraordinarily unusual for the administration to become at all active.”
Hay said that while most presidents wouldn’t have any say on existing cases, “Trump is a bit more of a wild card.”
But he added he couldn’t think of “any reason why he would interfere with cases that have already been filed,” adding: “It would be quite an extraordinary thing to do.”
While not much is expected to change for current antitrust cases, Hay said, Trump may take a less aggressive approach to antitrust enforcement than Vice President Kamala Harris would have.
Besides, Hay said, “most of the low-hanging fruit has already been picked,” meaning there aren’t many new antitrust cases that could be filed against the biggest tech companies.
One factor that could change things is who Trump appoints as the assistant attorney general leading the antitrust division.
Hay said that if Trump appoints an experienced, practicing lawyer, “even if that lawyer is relatively conservative, I don’t think things are going to change very much.”
“The changes we’ve observed over history are when the Republicans appointed an academic,” Hay added. “That’s where you see some radical changes.”
But overall, he said, not much is likely to change on the antitrust front under Trump’s second administration.
“So if I had very strong views about antitrust, I could sleep well at night regardless of who gets appointed,” Hay said. “Because it’s a system with laws and courts and people, and most of the people and most of the courts, and most of the laws are not going to change.”
Republicans have historically been ‘more merger-friendly’
Hay expected that “more big mergers will be proposed under Trump” while Dan Romanoff, a senior equity research analyst at Morningstar, suggested that Trump was less likely to oppose major deals.
More aggressive merger guidelines were put in place under President Joe Biden in 2023; now, under Trump, “those are going to go, and they’ll be replaced,” Hay said.
But still, new guidelines won’t have much impact on the biggest tech companies, Hay said.
Anna Rathbun, chief investment officer at CBIZ, told Business Insider that M&A activity has been low for the past two years because of low interest rates — not because of an antagonistic attitude from the Biden administration.
And the notion that Republicans are more business-friendly could be due to “short-term memory,” she said, noting that the first Trump administration sued to block a merger between AT&T and Time Warner.
While a Republican administration is usually considered to be more business-friendly, Walton said it might not be so straightforward under Trump.
“It can wax and wane to whatever the flavor of the month is in terms of where his administration wants to focus, or who he wants to benefit,” he said.
Restricting H1-B visas could damage America’s competitive edge
Trump made a widespread immigration crackdown a centerpiece of his 2024 campaign — and now that he’s president, that could impact an understaffed tech sector relying on H1-B visas as the AI hiring wars rage on.
National security concerns — with two current wars — are vastly different than when Trump wanted to restrict H1-Bs during his first term, Rathbun told BI. But at the same time, “we have a worker shortage,” she added.
Experts fear that, if H1-Bs are restricted under the second Trump administration, the US could lose its competitive edge on the world stage.
“You shouldn’t ban exports on chips and then completely export the talented labor,” Rathbun said. “That makes no sense.”
James Brundage, Ernst & Young’s global and Americas technology sector leader, added that any company relying on overseas hiring will be challenged in coming years.
Three of the world’s largest companies have immigrant CEOs, he said, adding that, while the US has built up a tech lead over decades, “you can see how that could slow.”
And as retailers like Walmart and Target become increasingly tech-like, a crackdown on high-skilled immigrant talent could complicate their business, Saunders and Walton said.
Some think Trump may not follow through on his rhetoric once he takes office in January.
Valerie Wirtschafter, a fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Foreign Policy, Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technology Initiative, told BI she thought the Trump administration would prioritize US leadership and “maintaining that lead at all costs.”
She added that, if bringing talent in through H1-B visas keeps the US competitive, even if it’s at odds with Trump’s campaign promises, “I think they’ll find some way to reconcile or ignore some of those campaign promises, too.”
Trump’s vow to rescind Biden’s AI order could be ‘double-edged’
Trump has not provided many specific details about what AI policies he would pursue — though he did call the technology “very dangerous” after posting AI-generated images of “Swifties for Trump.”
“Our instinct is that Trump would be more hands-off and Harris would be more hands-on,” Romanoff said of AI regulation.
One thing Trump has promised is to rescind Biden’s executive order on AI, which outlines policies around AI governance, promoting competition, and addressing AI-enabled threats. Trump had said the order challenges free speech.
Wirtschafter told BI that repealing Biden’s order would be a mixed bag for tech companies.
“I think it’s double-edged in some sense where, of course, less regulation, less reporting, less bureaucratic hoops to jump through, that’s all good and great,” Wirtschafter said.
But she added that rescinding the order could also be “somewhat unsettling,” adding, “Some of these companies do want some sort of road map for this technology, and the more harmonized it can be, the better.”