For a week, Silicon Valley’s bet on Donald Trump looked to be turning very bad, very quickly. The hit to complex electronics supply chains made Apple, Nvidia and Tesla among the biggest casualties of the US president’s assault on the global trading system. And with potentially ruinous tariffs looming on computer systems embedded with GPUs — the chips fuelling the artificial intelligence boom — it was possible to imagine the training of the most advanced AI models being driven outside the US.
The temporary stay of execution produced a monumental relief rally that added $1tn to the value of Apple, Nvidia and Tesla. But renewed pressure on tech stocks on Thursday was a reminder that the issues behind the trade upheaval are entirely unresolved.
The US tech industry grew up in the age of globalisation and was thoroughly shaped by it. It always looked like a risk for some of its most prominent leaders to throw their lot in with Maga, whose nativist and isolationist instincts clash directly with many of tech’s interests.