Why Tech Companies Are Joining the GOP-Oil Alliance

A common denominator among the tech giants warming up to Trump is that they all have a lot to gain from his administration—and not just in the form of lower taxes. Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta all control cloud computing infrastructure that’s poised to benefit from the energy-intensive vision of AI development these developers are pushing. Like Palantir—founded by longtime Trump backer Peter Thiel, and openly ecstatic about the new Trump era—Salesforce is poised to benefit from AI software. During the Biden era, AI developers touted their commitments to helping develop regulatory safeguards for the technology and argued that AI’s allegedly inevitable exponential growth could be a sum-positive for the climate because they would use zero-carbon power and invest in fledgling or far-off technologies like nuclear fusion and direct air capture. 

This week at a very different kind of Paris confab from the one that launched the famous climate agreement, Vice President JD Vance signaled that the new White House isn’t so worried about all the possible problems with AI: “I’m not here this morning to talk about AI safety,” he said at the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit. “I’m here to talk about AI opportunities.” During his first week in office, Trump announced the Stargate Project, a $500 billion partnership between Microsoft partner OpenAI, SoftBank, and MGX (a tech investment arm of the United Arab Emirates government) to build a massive network of data centers across the U.S. Salesforce announced this week that it’s planning $500 million of AI-related investments in Saudi Arabia. Like the U.S., Saudi Arabia—a major oil and gas exporter—is looking to capitalize on its abundance of wealth and fossil fuels to become an AI superpower, including in a $100 billion initiative called Project Transcendence.  

Given the massive amounts of energy needed to expand AI as dramatically and quickly as the industry claims is necessary, tech and fossil fuel companies have an increasingly common set of interests. On a recent quarterly earnings call, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy called AI the “biggest opportunity in business since the internet.” The main constraint on its growth, he added, is energy. “I think the world is still constrained on power from where I think we all believe we could serve customers if we were unconstrained,” he told investor analysts.