Tech billionaires’ days moonlighting as climate activists are behind them. Companies and executives who talked a big game about their green bona fides just a few years ago—and poured millions into environmental causes—have lined up behind Trump. Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is the most obvious example, but Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai all had VIP seats at Trump’s inauguration. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Meta (plus Zuck and Bezos personally) donated $1 million each to the event. Salesforce CEO and former Trump critic Marc Benioff took to The New York Times in 2019 to rage against rising temperatures and economic inequality, calling for a “new capitalism” that included higher taxes on the wealthy and would “generate the trillions of dollars that we desperately need to improve education and health care and fight climate change.” But now, he says Trump’s new term offers a “new opportunity” to “get behind our president.” Time magazine, co-owned by Benioff and his wife, crowned Trump Person of the Year for 2024.
In other words, tech magnates, including longtime Democratic Party donors, are starting to sound a lot more like reliably Republican-leaning fossil fuel executives. The New York Times noted this week that the billionaires who railed against Trump’s decision to pull the United States out of the Paris climate agreement in 2017 have been silent about the same decision this time around, and have also said little about the president’s early-days attacks on everything from electric vehicles to renewable energy. So what changed?
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.
Fossil fuel companies are cashing in on Silicon Valley’s newfound thirst. “Data centers are learning a lot about the natural gas business and how critical it is to what they’re doing,” Marshall McCrea, CEO of the pipeline firm Energy Transfer, told investor analysts recently. “And man, we couldn’t be more pleased and excited about this new business.”
One of the more striking examples is one of the “scenarios” outlined in oil and gas giant Shell’s 2025 Shell Energy Security Scenarios, released Wednesday. The annual report speculating about different possible futures includes one called “Surge,” in which the private sector “takes the lead on energy and economic growth as AI technologies reshape the global economy.” This AI-centric scenario sees “relative resilience for oil and gas production” owing to “more buoyant economic growth driving overall energy demand. Although new energy infrastructure appears rapidly, demand is such that existing energy production and systems are retained for longer.” Thanks to AI and surging economic growth, though, midcentury advancements in direct air capture and small modular nuclear reactors will keep global temperatures from rising by more than two degrees Celsius.
This is massively optimistic. In Surge, direct air carbon capture and storage, or DACCS, will remove more than 500 metric tons of carbon dioxide annually by 2030, and eight billion metric tons by 2100—a fifth of what the entire world currently emits each year. That technology is currently removing just 0.1 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year, per the International Energy Agency. The IEA’s own scenario for reaching net-zero emissions by 2050—which is relatively bullish about DACCS—forecasts DACCS capturing 65 metric tons by then, with the vast majority of reductions coming from phasing out fossil fuels and scaling up zero-carbon energy.
With Trump in office, tech and fossil fuel companies don’t seem too hung up on what the world of exponential growth that AI developers are pitching might actually mean for the planet. The White House isn’t either, of course. Whether tech magnates will keep pouring cash into climate philanthropy in their drift toward the GOP remains to be seen. But they aren’t the only ones less concerned about the future of the Paris Agreement. Ninety-five percent of countries—representing 83 percent of global emissions—failed to meet the deadline outlined in that pact for resubmitting emissions-reduction plans. Two separate studies published in Nature Climate Change this week concluded that it’s now virtually impossible to meet the Paris Agreement’s goal of capping global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit); that warmer future is already here.
