The massive budget bill signed into law by President Donald Trump on Independence Day didn’t include everything on Big Tech’s wishlist, but the industry’s largest players stand to gain significantly from several provisions in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
Technology
What Big Tech got out of Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill
The Republican-backed legislation is best known for its tax cuts on tips, deduction caps that could primarily benefit wealthy taxpayers, restriction on healthcare coverage for low-income and disabled Americans, cuts to renewable energy incentives, and tens of billions of dollars in funding to immigration enforcement. But it also includes restored tax deductions for research and development and other items that could benefit the tech industry, among other businesses.
In one high-profile fight, the tech industry failed to secure a moratorium on state AI laws, a proposal which had been supported by several trade groups and might have also affected a host of other state tech protections. But after months of lobbying from Congress to Mar-a-Lago, the industry will see slashed taxes and may receive new contracts from border enforcement funding, the Tech Oversight Project finds in a new report shared exclusively with The Verge. Some changes will likely benefit businesses of all sizes and sectors — while others may offer large companies in the tech industry the biggest benefits.
The budget bill essentially reverses a policy from Trump’s first term that limited how companies could write off research and development on their taxes. The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) forced companies to spread write-offs for domestic R&D costs across five years, rather than deducting them fully in the year they were incurred. Now, Congress is restoring the previous, more generous deduction setup, and small businesses can get retroactive tax write-offs for the last couple years when the changes — which took effect in 2022 — were in place.
In a recent report, Quartz linked the R&D deduction changes to the wave of layoffs across the industry, describing how it made it so companies could effectively only write off one-fifth of their R&D costs in the year they were incurred, rather than the full sum, making salaries for engineers and other high-skilled roles much more costly. The nonpartisan Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) found that in the three years in which the TCJA changes took effect, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Tesla saw their tax bills rise a collective $75 billion as a result.
“The loss of full R&D expensing disincentivizes firms from significantly increasing their R&D investments”
So unsurprisingly, tech-backed groups like the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) and the Business Software Alliance (BSA) pushed to revert the rule. “The loss of full R&D expensing disincentivizes firms from significantly increasing their R&D investments because the cost of those investments has risen,” ITIF wrote in a blog post earlier this year.
Maintaining a lower corporate tax rate
Conversely, business groups successfully pleaded with lawmakers to keep a different change from the TCJA: a massive reduction in the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent. In a letter to lawmakers last year, tech-backed Information Technology Industry Council (ITI) told lawmakers that the reduction had brought the US in line with peer countries, and provided US companies “a more level playing field against their international competitors,” which the nonprofit Tax Foundation found helped boost US investment. Democrats who have opposed the lower tax rates have framed it as a handout to corporate America.
Extending lower international tax rates
The new budget law also blocks a scheduled increase in the effective tax rates on things like the money companies make abroad based on US-based patents or other intangible assets.
These kinds of taxes — the base erosion and anti-abuse tax (BEAT), global intangible low-taxed income tax (GILTI), and the foreign-derived intangible income tax (FDII) — are generally meant to prevent shifty accounting practices like moving assets to a foreign subsidiary. Before the One Big Beautiful Bill Act passed, the effectively lowered rates through these three policies were set to expire at the end of 2025.
The tech industry argued protecting those low rates would keep US companies competitive with other countries, like France and the UK. “Several other nations already offer IP incentives,” ITI told lawmakers in an October letter. “It is essential that the FDII rate remains as low as possible.”
“The tax break disproportionately benefits large corporations with significant intellectual property portfolios”
But groups like the nonpartisan Financial Accountability and Corporate Transparency (FACT) Coalition and ITEP see lower rates for taxes like the FDII as a giveaway to the biggest players in the tech industry, which deal heavily in intangible assets like patents and trademarks.
“The tax break disproportionately benefits large corporations with significant intellectual property portfolios while doing little for smaller firms that lack similar assets,” ITEP wrote in a blog post last year, where it found that Google parent Alphabet reported over $11 billion in tax benefits from 2018 to 2023 as a result of the FDII.
Border protection funding could flow to tech
Alongside a significant budget increase for Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and other immigration-related funding, the law includes about $6 billion for border technologies, including surveillance systems. That money could flow to several large tech firms already engaged in the space.
Those include Peter Thiel-founded data company Palantir, which currently has a $30 million contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to build “ImmigrationOS” to create “near real-time visibility into instances of self-deportation.” Thiel-backed Anduril also stands to gain if the agency expands infrastructure like the surveillance towers it already supplies to the government. MIT Technology Review reported in 2018 that Amazon Web Services hosted Department of Homeland Security (DHS) databases related to immigration, including a deep pool of biometric data.
Other tax-saving adjustments
Tech companies and other businesses will also benefit from changes in how business interest deductions are calculated, and a permanent extension of rules allowing companies to take a full deduction of certain equipment expenses. House Democrats have previously called this kind of tactic a “Tax Scam,” writing, “Two-thirds of the benefits go to corporations making over $250 million in revenue, and from 2018 through 2021, about two dozen of the largest corporations received roughly $50 billion in tax breaks through this provision.”
Some of the tax changes in the bill will benefit smaller firms and businesses across many different industries. But large tech companies are particularly well positioned to benefit from changes in how foreign profits on intellectual property are taxed and fuller R&D write-offs. After months of cozying up to the Trump administration with little to show for it, it looks like the largest players in the industry have finally notched some wins.
When Oregon resident Isabelle Reksopuro heard Google was gobbling up public land to fuel its data centers in her home state, she didn’t initially know what to believe. “There’s a lot of misinformation about data centers,” she said. “Google has denied taking that land.”
Technically, she explains, The Dalles, a city near the Washington state border, sought to reclaim that land, “and Google is just a big, unnamed power user.” The city had in fact asked for ownership of a 150-acre portion of Mount Hood National Forest, claiming it needs access to Mount Hood’s watershed to meet municipal needs as its population — 16,010 as of the 2020 census — grows. But critics, including environmentalists, say the city is trying to secure more water for Google, which has a sprawling data center campus in The Dalles that already consumes about one-third of the city’s water supply.
This controversy made Reksopuro curious about the backlash to data centers being built in other communities. So Reksopuro, a student at the University of Washington who studies the connections between tech and public policy, decided to map it out. Using information collected by Epoch AI and data scraped from legislation on data centers, she built an interactive map tracking AI policy around the world. She designed it to be simple enough for anyone to use. “I wanted it to be something that my younger sisters could play through and explore to understand what are the data centers in the area and what’s actually being done about it,” Reksopuro said. She hoped to shift their opinions that way, “instead of like, through TikTok.”
Four times a day, the map searches for new sources and checks them against the existing database Reksopuro built out. “Once it does that, it will write a new summary, add it to the news feed, and populate it on the sidebar,” she said. “I wanted it to be self-updating, since I’m also a student.”
Reksopuro isn’t against data centers, but she thinks tech giants benefit from a lack of transparency around data center policies. “Right now, it’s this really opaque thing — and all of a sudden, there’s a facility,” she said. “I think that if people knew about data centers beforehand, it would give them leverage. They would be able to negotiate: ask for job training programs, tax revenue, environmental monitoring, things to improve their community.”
UCF commencement speaker Gloria Caulfield (University of Central Florida via Storyful)
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TOUGH CROWD: During a recent commencement ceremony at the University of Central Florida, a speaker was met with loud boos from the graduating class after declaring that artificial intelligence represents the next industrial revolution. Fox News Digital reporting captures this tense cultural moment, illustrating the mixed public sentiment and skepticism surrounding AI’s growing footprint in daily life.
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FBI Director Kash Patel listened as Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche spoke during a press conference at the Department of Justice on April 28, 2026, in Washington, D.C. (Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)
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ROAD HAZARD: Waymo is issuing a sweeping recall of its autonomous vehicle fleet following a concerning incident that highlighted significant safety issues with the self-driving technology. Fox News Digital reporting outlines the specifics of the recall, the nature of the safety flaw, and what this setback means for the future of fully autonomous transportation on public roads.
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Microsoft Edge is adding a new feature that will allow its Copilot AI chatbot to gather information from all of your open tabs. When you start a conversation with Copilot, you can ask the chatbot questions about what’s in your tabs, compare the products you’re looking at, summarize your open articles, and more.
In its announcement, Microsoft says you can “select which experiences you want or leave off the ones you don’t.” The company is retiring Copilot Mode as well, which could similarly draw information from your tabs but offered some agentic features, like the ability to book a reservation on your behalf. Microsoft has since folded these agentic capabilities into its “Browse with Copilot” tool.
Several other AI features are coming to Edge, including an AI-powered “Study and Learn” mode that can turn the article you’re looking at into a study session or interactive quiz. There’s a new tool that turns your tabs into AI-powered podcasts as well, similar to what you’d find on NotebookLM, and an AI writing assistant that will pop up when you start entering text on a webpage.
You can also give Copilot permission to access your browsing history to provide more “relevant, high-quality answers,” according to Microsoft. Copilot in Edge on desktop and mobile will come with “long-term memory” as well, which can tailor its responses based on your previous conversations. And, when you open up a new tab, you’ll see a redesigned page that combines chat, search, and web navigation, along with the Journeys feature, which uses AI to organize your browsing history into categories that you can revisit.
Meanwhile, an update to Edge’s mobile app will allow you to share your screen with Copilot and talk through the questions about what you’re seeing. Microsoft says you’ll see “clear visual cues” when Copilot is active, “so you know when it’s taking an action, helping, listening, or viewing.”
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