In President Donald Trump’s second term, Silicon Valley’s most powerful executives made an unusually public show of allegiance. Top CEOs took prominent seats on the dais at Trump’s inauguration, showering the president with gifts and donations, including contributions to the White House ballroom.
For two years, they enjoyed extraordinary access to the president as his administration rolled back regulations, weakened government oversight and embraced artificial intelligence’s rapid expansion. Some right-leaning tech figures, such as Elon Musk and venture capitalist David Sacks, took formal roles in the administration.
But as Democrats swept races across the country last week — propelled in part by Americans’ rage over data centers and fears about AI — some tech leaders are now plotting a dramatic shift in strategy.
In group chats and phone calls, a group of left-leaning donors and advisers are quietly coalescing on a vision to wrest control of the agenda from the Trump-aligned industry leaders.
It is too soon to tell if this new group will carry sway over the tech industry broadly as Congress changes hands, but there are already nascent signs that top companies are preparing for a new political reality in which Americans — and Democrats — are deeply skeptical of the combative, build-at-all-costs race with China that dominated the Trump years.
These new voices are exploring policies that would have been unpalatable to industry until recently, such as slowing or pausing data center development, showering billions of dollars in concessions on communities for schools and job training, and requiring data centers to use union labor and shield residents from higher electricity bills.
Jay Carney, a former press secretary to President Barack Obama and partner at venture firm SV Angel, said companies had to acknowledge the message voters sent and shift their approach.
“The public has felt in a lot of communities that this is happening to them and they don’t have a voice,” he said.
The goal, said eight left-leaning strategists, industry executives and investors familiar with the discussions, is to make the technology’s expansion worth the public’s while. Several spoke on the condition of anonymity because the conversations are private and still evolving.
Some are beginning to voice these opinions in public, including investor Reid Hoffman, who called for the tech industry to deliver an economic message to Americans in a September blog post.
“The public deserves the benefits of AI as soon as there are any, not a generation from now after a hard transition,” he wrote.
Chris Lehane, chief global affairs officer at ChatGPT maker OpenAI, said he expects to see companies to move “beyond the table stakes of paying for energy, preserving water, addressing noise and generating tax revenue.”
In an interview, he said companies will have to ensure communities “increasingly exercise more of a direct say” in the areas targeted for corporate investments. He added, “Communities have every right to use their control over these projects so as to ensure that they are getting meaningful benefits.”
Many of the voices on the left want to break decisively with the right-wing tech leaders’ approach, which they blame, along with some tech leaders’ doomsday predictions, for fueling public backlash. Some said figures such as former AI czar Sacks and investor Marc Andreessen, along with their online supporters, dismissed public concerns and treated skeptics condescendingly. The Trump administration’s close ties to business elites, and allegations of corruption, further eroded trust in the industry, they said.
“They won an election having supported Trump thinking we can do whatever we want, and that was wrong,” said one of the people.
Sacks has previously blamed the public opposition to AI on factions of the tech industry that for years have issued apocalyptic warnings about the dangers of the technology. He and Andreessen did not respond to requests for comment. A White House official said Trump was “committed to ensuring America continues to lead the world in super intelligence while protecting American consumers.”
In the days following the midterms, the Trump-supporting crowd — some of the loudest voices in the tech industry — was unusually quiet.
On a Nov. 8 episode of the “All-In” podcast, which serves as the nerve center of the right-leaning crowd in tech, some of the hosts appeared more reflective after the midterm wipeout.
“I thought top-down economics can still work,” said tech investor Chamath Palihapitiya, who fundraised for Trump. “I thought that when you had asset owners building assets and investing in the economy, these things can get to everybody else. It’s clearly not happening. It’s not true.”
But there were also signs that despite their defeat, Trump’s tech allies were planning for combat.
Sacks said on the podcast that he suspects Democrats will use AI regulation to push for censorship: “I believe that Democrats want to create a surveillance and censorship state that’s turbocharged by super intelligence.”
But even as Congress changes hands, the Trump-supporting tech leaders still hold sway within the White House.
Facing both public opposition and pressure from lawmakers, tech companies have already begun to offer a wave of bigger concessions to communities that may host data centers.
In recent weeks, Google and Microsoft have said they will stop the practice of requiring government officials to sign controversial nondisclosure agreements that block them from publicly sharing information about data center development. Amazon pledged to disclose more information about data centers’ energy and water use. Meta and Amazon said recently that they will each dedicate $1 billion to host communities for incentives such as schools and job training.
These efforts will now be championed more broadly across the tech industry and be redoubled, said Lehane. He pointed to one of the company’s recently announced projects — an investment of half a trillion dollars in a 27,000-person town in Appalachia that is recovering from the closure of a uranium enrichment plant in the early 2000s that was the region’s economic hub. The facility will be a campus on a polluted site that will be cleaned up and built by 25,000 unionized workers and create 5,000 additional permanent jobs.
On Saturday, data center company CoreWeave wrote to congratulate Texas Gov.-elect Gina Hinojosa (D), who had campaigned on restricting the facilities.
“As you have noted, communities should have a voice, households should not be left paying for new infrastructure and development should protect local water, power, and quality of life,” CoreWeave chief executive Michael Intrator wrote. “We strongly support those principles.”
Though the industry has pushed to develop AI as quickly as possible, flooding the country with data centers, some in Silicon Valley are starting to concede that a slowdown of a year or so would be fine, said two of the people.
“If tech can’t give [communities] a good enough offer, then it should be banned,” said a venture capitalist familiar with the thinking of Democratic donors in tech. “It needs to be made worth people’s while.”
The effort to convince the public faces a steep uphill climb. Voters overwhelmingly backed restrictions on data centers in ballots in 10 states last week, signaling deep resistance to the industry’s rapid expansion. And in the days after the midterms, the stock market shuddered as investors weighed what Democrats’ newfound political power — and growing public opposition to AI — could mean for the industry.
Investors’ uncertainty points to the risk of a significant slowdown, given the AI build-out’s outsize role in the stock market. Chinese AI companies, meanwhile, are racing to catch up to the industry’s American leaders, hoping their technology can become the global standard.
The next presidential election is two years away, leaving little time to turn public hostility into political support.
Alex Bores, a New York state lawmaker whose push for tighter AI regulation turned him into an AI policy whisperer for Democrats, said in an interview that he has been fielding calls constantly since the election from AI industry power brokers. He characterized the calls as “conciliatory” and “buttering up,” and said AI lobbyists and executives know that more regulation of the technology is probably coming.
“The AI companies are realizing, as we all did, how much the balance of power has shifted in D.C. and in statehouses,” said Bores, who co-founded the AI regulation advocacy group Who Decides. “They realized that the election was a loud signal that their money cannot overpower the will of the people anymore.”
Tech firms could also have other reasons for wanting to ease the pace of the frenetic AI build-out. Companies large and small have taken on huge amounts of debt to fund their AI spending and face shortages of electricity supply and energy equipment. Some industry officials say that many of the hundreds of large-scale AI data centers planned or under construction are unlikely to become operational regardless of public reaction.
Even as some in the party call for a more confrontational approach to the industry, some are finding common ground with Democrats.
“There is a certain wing of the Democratic Party that is looking for its pound of flesh from Big Tech, and then there’s another more pragmatic wing that is actually looking to accomplish things and pass legislation that will help improve the lives of their constituents,” said Nu Wexler, a tech consultant who previously worked at Twitter and Facebook.
The industry has had time to prepare for Democrats’ return to power. Leading companies never totally cut ties with the party, recruiting officials who had served in the Biden administration and had warm relationships on Capitol Hill.
Companies that cut deals with the Trump administration and supported the president’s pet projects are bracing for barrage of investigations from Democrats newly empowered to issue subpoenas. Lobbyists said that with Trump officials likely to stonewall any probes, companies will come under additional pressure to cooperate.
“They’re going to have a hard time with a lot of members who are very mad about the very blatant pay-to-play and the coziness they have had with the administration,” said a Democratic House aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal dynamics. “It’s going to take a lot more than lobbyists just showing up in offices and saying we want to work with Democrats now.”
Yet the size of Democrats’ margins also means no one faction of the party will have outsize power. While figures such as Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats, have called for a national moratorium on data center construction and a pause on AI development, some lawmakers are looking to take a more measured approach to the industry.
Rep. Sam Liccardo (D-California), whose district includes the heart of Silicon Valley, backed dozens of winning Democrats through a fundraising committee he called Innovation for Good. While his tech industry constituents had supported Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, he said they became disillusioned by what they saw an “anti-tech” stance that took hold in the Biden administration.
“This is a very, very blue place,” Liccardo said. “These are folks who want to see technology work for all Americans.”
Liccardo said Democrats now need to show voters that they have solutions for their concerns about AI, and that is going to mean working with the industry in some cases.
“We won’t be forgiven two years from now, if all we did was: held hearings, piously poked our fingers in the air and blamed tech CEOs for all of our ills,” Liccardo said. “Congress has to act.”
Shira Ovide contributed to this report.
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