Apple announced on February 24 that it’s going to spend and make investments greater than $500 billion within the U.S. over the subsequent 4 years. President Donald Trump took to social media to credit his administration for the announcement. With out his insurance policies, the president mentioned, Apple “would not be investing ten cents.” Nevertheless, Trump’s antitrust and commerce insurance policies could possibly be the very factor that stops different massive companies from making related bulletins.
Apple’s plans embrace a 250,000-square-foot server manufacturing facility in Houston, which is able to energy Apple Intelligence, its proprietary generative AI; doubling its U.S. Superior Manufacturing Fund from $5 billion to $10 billion; hiring 20,000 People; and opening an Apple Manufacturing Academy in Michigan to assist companies implement AI and good manufacturing methods. A monetary evaluation carried out by The Wall Avenue Journal concludes that “Apple’s introduced determine is in keeping with what one would possibly anticipate the corporate to be spending anyway.”
Trump touted Apple’s home spending dedication nonetheless, and Vice President J.D. Vance chastised European leaders for “tightening the [regulatory] screws on U.S. tech firms with worldwide footprints” on the Paris AI Summit earlier this month. On the identical time, Trump’s Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Division of Justice (DOJ) are perpetuating the presumptively anti–Huge Tech antitrust framework applied underneath Joe Biden.
Andrew Ferguson, Trump’s confirmed chair of the FTC, announced a public inquiry into Huge Tech censorship on Thursday. The FTC’s request for public comment asks respondents to contemplate whether or not “platforms’ adversarial actions made doable by an absence of competitors” and to what extent “platforms [used] their dominance…to stop competitors from platforms with completely different moderation insurance policies.”
The DOJ introduced two main antitrust instances in opposition to Google and one in opposition to Apple through the Biden administration. Abigail Slater, Trump’s nominee for assistant legal professional common of the DOJ’s antitrust division, mentioned at her Senate affirmation hearing that she was “not aware of the main points of the Antitrust Division’s lawsuits in opposition to Google and Apple.” Two days earlier than Slater’s listening to, the Tech Oversight Project, a nonprofit “devoted to reining in Huge Tech,” described her as “a powerful candidate to [hold] Huge Tech value gougers and monopolists accountable.” Slater’s listening to responses verify this description: She responded within the affirmative to Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse’s (D–R.I.) query if she’d “prioritize enforcement in opposition to Huge Tech” and informed Sen. Chuck Grassley (R–Iowa) that the tech trade needs to be a spotlight of the antitrust division.
Trump credited his threatened tariffs on Mexico with stopping Apple’s development of two semiconductor fabrication crops in Mexico whereas speaking to reporters on Friday. Trump said that “the tariffs are wonderful,” however encouraging companies to supply the place they in any other case wouldn’t is nothing to have fun. If Apple determined to construct its plant in Houston in response to Trump’s pending tariffs, then manufacturing in Mexico would have been inexpensive in its absence; some proportion of those decrease manufacturing prices would have translated to cheaper Apple merchandise for American shoppers. In celebrating tariffs as a device of commercial coverage, Trump is absolutely celebrating greater costs. Costs are additional hiked when tariffed nations reply in variety: China banned the export of uncommon supplies utilized in semiconductors, photo voltaic panels, and batteries to the U.S. in December 2024 following American export controls on chipmaking instruments.
As a substitute of partaking in distortive commerce coverage that makes Apple merchandise dearer, Trump could make home manufacturing extra engaging by lowering the regulatory burden. Miring companies like Apple and Google in costly antitrust litigation does the other.
