Tech industry giants are hiring thousands of foreign workers through H-1B visas each year, even as the program faces renewed scrutiny under President Donald Trump’s second term and growing skepticism from Silicon Valley leaders who once championed it.
The H-1B program allows US companies to hire up to 85,000 foreign workers with specialized skills annually. Workers are chosen through an annual lottery, which kicked off last week and will run through March 24. While Trump expressed support in December, calling it “a great program” that he has “used many times,” key figures in his political base have voiced opposition.
Things escalated late last year when Trump appointed Sriram Krishnan, a first-generation Indian American who immigrated to the US from India in 2007, to serve as a senior White House advisor for AI. The appointment drew backlash from some MAGA supporters, including former Trump aide Steve Bannon, who called the program “a total and complete scam to destroy the American worker.”
In late January, Republican Senators John Kennedy and Rick Scott introduced a joint resolution under the Congressional Review Act to reverse a Biden-era rule that extended the automatic renewal period for employment authorization documents from 180 days to 540 days. Kennedy said the extension “hampers the Trump administration’s efforts to enforce our immigration laws,” signaling there would be additional scrutiny of work permits for foreign nationals.
Even tech leaders have softened their stance. Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen, once unequivocal supporters, have recently acknowledged the need for improvement.
Andreessen said on Lex Fridman’s podcast last month that the US has been conducting “a 60-year social engineering experiment to exclude native-born people from the educational slots and jobs that high-skill immigration has been funneling foreigners into.”
Musk has called for raising the minimum salary requirements for people on H-1B visas and adding a “yearly cost” to make it more expensive for companies to hire from overseas. “I’ve been very clear that the program is broken and needs major reform,” he posted on X.
While the program’s future remains uncertain, any significant changes or restrictions to H-1B visas would profoundly impact America’s largest technology companies, which have built their workforces around access to global talent.
Business Insider used publicly available data from the Department of Labor and US Citizenship and Immigration Services to analyze which tech companies filed the most H-1B requests during the 2024 government fiscal year. The data comes from applications submitted by businesses seeking to sponsor skilled workers’ visas.
Our analysis shows that tech giants collectively file for thousands of these visas annually, using them to fill critical roles that they claim cannot be adequately staffed domestically.
Notably, not every visa filing results in an actual hire, and occasionally multiple filings might be associated with a single position. Companies sometimes submit new applications to accommodate amendments or extend existing visas. Nevertheless, the data available to the public offers a reliable glimpse into the H-1B visa requirements of major corporations.
We have excluded IT consulting firms from this analysis to focus specifically on tech product companies, despite consulting giants like Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services traditionally being among the program’s largest users.
The analysis reveals that tech giants like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Apple are among the program’s heaviest users, with thousands of filings each.
While most positions are for software engineers and other technical roles, companies also use the program to fill specialized positions in research, product management, and data science. The employee head count for each firm comes from the latest publicly available data such as the company’s latest annual report, their corporate website, or according to sources BI spoke with.
The firms listed either did not respond to a request for comment or declined to comment on the record.
Here are the top 40 tech companies sponsoring H-1B visas, ranked by their number of filings:
1. Amazon
Total certified H-1B filings: 14,783 (including 23 for Whole Foods).
Total employees worldwide: 1,556,000 as of the end of 2024.
2. Microsoft
Total certified H-1B filings: 5,695 flings (including 970 from LinkedIn).
Total employees worldwide: 228,000 as of the second quarter of 2024.
3. Alphabet
Total certified H-1B filings: 5,537 (including 115 from Waymo and Verily).
Total employees worldwide: 183,323 as of the end of 2024.
4. Meta
Total certified H-1B filings: 4,844.
Total employees worldwide: 74,067 as of the end of 2024.
5. Apple
Total certified H-1B filings: 3,880.
Total employees worldwide: 164,000 as of the third quarter of 2024.
6. IBM
Total certified H-1B filings: 2,907.
Total employees worldwide: More than 293,400 as of the end of 2024.
7. Intel
Total certified H-1B filings: 2,558.
Total employees worldwide: 108,900 as of the end of 2024.
8. Oracle
Total certified H-1B filings: 2,141.
Total employees worldwide: 159,000 as of the end of May 2024.
9. Tesla
Total certified H-1B filings: 1,677.
Total employees worldwide: 125,665 as of the end of 2024.
10. Bytedance
Total certified H-1B filings: 1,611.
Total employees worldwide: More than 150,000, according to the company’s website.
11. Salesforce
Total certified H-1B filings: 1,525 (A Salesforce spokesperson said that the company filed 1,808 H-1B petitions in fiscal year 2024 including new hires, amendments, and extensions).
Total employees worldwide: 76,453 as of the end of January 2025.
12. Nvidia
Total certified H-1B filings: 1,519.
Total employees worldwide: 36,000 as of the end of fiscal year 2025.
13. Cisco
Total certified H-1B filings: 1,330.
Total employees worldwide: 90,400 as of the end of fiscal year 2024.
14. Qualcomm
Total certified H-1B filings: 1,291.
Total employees worldwide: 49,000 employees as of the end of the third quarter of 2024.
15. Adobe
Total certified H-1B filings: 787.
Total employees worldwide: More than 30,708 of as November 2024.
16. Intuit
Total certified H-1B filings: 770.
Total employees worldwide: 18,200 at the end of fiscal year 2024.
17. Uber
Total certified H-1B filings: 703.
Total employees worldwide: 31,100 as of the end of 2024.
18. Paypal
Total certified H-1B filings: 623.
Total employees worldwide: 24,400 as of the end of 2024.
19. eBay
Total certified H-1B filings: 548 (An eBay spokesperson said eBay filed 494 H-1B visas in fiscal year 2024, noting that the publicly available information doesn’t disclose the exact number of roles hired for.)
Total employees worldwide: 11,500 as of the end of 2024.
20. Rivian
Total certified H-1B filings: 584.
Total employees worldwide: 14,861 as of the end of 2024.
21. ServiceNow
Total certified H-1B filings: 578.
Total employees worldwide: 26,293 as of the end of 2024.
22. HP
Total certified H-1B filings: 533.
Total employees worldwide: 58,000 as of the end of 2024.
23. Dell
Total certified H-1B filings: 489.
Total employees worldwide: 120,000 as of February 2, 2024.
24. Lucid Motors
Total certified H-1B filings: 488.
Total employees worldwide: 6,800 as of the end of 2024.
25. DoorDash
Total certified H-1B filings: 427.
Total employees worldwide: 23,700 as of the end of 2024.
26. Fiserv
Total certified H-1B filings: 403.
Total employees worldwide: 38,000 as of the end of 2024.
27. Micron Technology
Total certified H-1B filings: 369.
Total employees worldwide: 48,000 as of August 29, 2024.
28. VMWare
Total certified H-1B filings: 359.
Total employees worldwide: 16,000 according to Business Insider’s sources.
29. ADP
Total certified H-1B filings: 350.
Total employees worldwide: 64,000 as of June 2024.
30. Workday
Total certified H-1B filings: 347.
Total employees worldwide: 20,400 as of January 31, 2025.
31. Expedia
Total certified H-1B filings: 331.
Total employees worldwide: 16,500 as of the end of 2024.
32. MathWorks
Total certified H-1B filings: 295.
Total employees worldwide: 6,500, according to the corporate website.
33. Snowflake
Total certified H-1B filings: 285.
Total employees worldwide: 7,004 as of January 31, 2024.
34. Databricks
Total certified H-1B filings: 283.
Total employees worldwide: More than 7,000, according to the company’s website.
35. Synopsys
Total certified H-1B filings: 267.
Total employees worldwide: 20,000 as of November 2024.
36. Stripe
Total certified H-1B filings: 265.
Total employees worldwide: Approximately 8,200 according to BI’s reporting.
37. Snap
Total certified H-1B filings: 258
Total employees worldwide: 4,911 as of December 2024.
38. Netflix
Total certified H-1B filings: 256.
Total employees worldwide: 14,000 as of the end of 2024.
39. Block
Total certified H-1B filings: 231.
Total employees worldwide: 11,372 as of the end of 2024.
40. Pinterest
Total certified H-1B filings: 225.
Total employees worldwide: 4,666 as of the end of 2024.
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