Silicon Valley technology companies’ cozy relationship with President Donald Trump appears to be deepening and bearing fruit, as firms and their leaders show fealty with gifts, policies, and public statements of support, and CEOs show their ability to influence the President on matters of politics and business.

In recent weeks, the White House has confirmed that Google, Meta, Apple, and HP donated to the construction of Trump’s new White House ballroom, with Santa Clara chip giant Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang later saying he was “delighted to be part of it.” The companies and the White House did not respond to questions about specific amounts given.

Google and YouTube parent Alphabet in late September agreed to pay $22 million toward the ballroom, in a settlement over a lawsuit by Trump over his suspension from YouTube after the January 6 insurrection. In similar cases, Meta agreed to pay $22 million toward Trump’s presidential library, and X agreed to pay a settlement of about $10 million.

At Trump’s inauguration in January, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Apple CEO Tim Cook sat behind the President. Google and Meta donated $1 million each to Trump’s inauguration committee, as did Cook and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman personally.

in August, Trump announced that the U.S. was taking a 10 percent stake in Intel, and chipmakers Nvidia and AMD agreed to pay the government 15 percent of their AI chip sales in China.

The same month, Apple’s Cook, facing the possibility of steep tariffs affecting the price of iPhones, gave Trump a plaque with a 24-karat gold bar as a base, as the pair announced the Cupertino firm planned to invest $100 billion in domestic manufacturing. On the same day, the White House announced iPhones would be exempted from 50% tariffs on India, where Apple makes most of its U.S.-bound iPhones.

Actions, statements and payments by major Silicon Valley tech companies are adding momentum to a political shift that started taking shape before Trump’s inauguration in January. The change has come into sharper focus with moves by Google, Meta and Salesforce to back away from workforce-diversity efforts attacked by the President, while Google and Meta have weakened content moderation, long seen by conservatives as censorship of their views.

Tech leaders are confronting a new reality, said Sean Randolph, senior director of the Economic Institute at the Bay Area Council, which represents businesses including tech giants Google, Meta, Apple and Salesforce. Under Trump’s hands-on approach to industrial relations, “the normal regulatory frameworks are being used less than executive action,” Randolph said. “The relationship with the president has become even more important than it was in the past.”

Shoveling cash at Trump to gain influence and and advance business objectives like lower taxes and less regulation shows Silicon Valley leaders’ typical pragmatism running up against an administration where money talks in unprecedented ways, said San Jose State University anthropology professor Jan English-Lueck, who has studied the tech industry for 30 years.

“They need to protect the assets of their companies from the very real threats that they could face,” English-Lueck said. While governments and officials in other countries may hit companies for fees and other payments outside formal tax systems she said, “the United States doesn’t necessarily come to mind as a place where that has to happen.”

Cal State East Bay lecturer Nolan Higdon, who studies politics, said he could not describe the tech industry’s Trump-related donations as gifts: “When they need something, they give him things.”

Google, Apple, HP, Salesforce and the White House did not respond to requests for comment. Meta and Nvidia provided background information in response to questions.

Last month, Google and Apple, under pressure from the Justice Department, removed from their online stores apps that tracked operations by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

During the run-up to Trump’s election for a second term, tech leaders began to swing toward him, frustrated with a Biden administration regulatory approach they saw as “overly intrusive,” the Bay Area Council’s Randolph said. The CEOs believed “their bottom line would fare better under Trump policies,” Randolph said.

Now, Silicon Valley’s Big Tech firms are investing hundreds of billions of dollars into artificial intelligence, while concerns over the technology spur calls for comprehensive regulation and more cautious development.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, OpenAI’s Altman, and Huang have publicly lauded Trump, and Google’s Pichai has praised the President’s AI plan to build more infrastructure in America, encourage innovation and work diplomatically on international issues.

Tech leaders’ sway with the President was highlighted late last month when Trump credited Benioff and Huang with helping to persuade him to cancel a law enforcement surge in San Francisco.

Meta on Thursday revealed in a regulatory filing that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau had shut down its investigation, launched late last year under former President Joe Biden, into the Menlo Park company’s advertising practices.

Although the federal government continues to pursue anti-monopoly cases against Google, the U.S. Department of Justice in March withdrew its demand in the internet-search monopoly case that the Mountain View firm be prohibited from acquiring or collaborating with generative AI companies without government consent.

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Affinities between Trump and Big Tech go both ways, said Sonoma State University political science professor David McCuan. Big Tech is seen as an engine of transformative change led by people who destroy convention — similar to how the President sees his administration and himself, McCuan said. For Trump, involving himself closely with the tech industry “allows him to think of himself in historic-change terms,” McCuan said, and the tech CEOs “can feed that like candy to him.”

To Randolph, tech leaders would probably be “derelict in their duties” to their companies and shareholders if they didn’t seek to maximize influence with Trump.

Higdon of Cal State East Bay wonders where that will lead.

“Trump has shown that unless you force him to stop or defeat him, he won’t stop,” Higdon said. “That begs the question with these tech execs: How much is he going to ask of them and how much are they going to give?”