San Francisco: On a Friday evening in late September, Amazon’s immigration team sent urgent messages to thousands of employees: return to the United States before midnight on Saturday or risk being stranded abroad. Microsoft and JPMorgan Chase issued similar warnings.​

The reason? President Donald Trump had just imposed a $US100,000 fee on new H-1B visas, effective immediately.​

The move blindsided an industry that had spent months courting the president. Just 16 days earlier, 33 Silicon Valley executives had gathered at a White House dinner, lavishing praise on Trump and announcing billions of dollars in investments. OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman told Trump he was “a very refreshing change”. Now, his employees were scrambling to airports.​

Donald Trump with Oracle’s Larry Ellison, SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son and Sam Altman of OpenAI.Credit: Bloomberg

The US tech sector is experiencing an unprecedented AI boom. In the first half of 2025 alone, venture capital funding for AI companies in the San Francisco metro area surpassed $US29 billion ($45 billion) – more than double the amount during the same period in 2022. Over the past five years, AI-related companies have leased more than 5 million square feet (465,000 square metres) of San Francisco office space. The city has become home to OpenAI, Scale AI, Anthropic, Perplexity, and Databricks – companies collectively valued at hundreds of billions of dollars.​

“That amount of energy being concentrated in San Francisco has just been huge for the city,” says Vijay Karunamurthy, former field chief technology officer at Scale AI, who has witnessed the city’s boom-and-bust cycles over 25 years.

“It means every single night there’s AI events. If you go to a coffee shop, you’ll run into people working on AI.”

But this flurry of activity is playing out against the backdrop of Trump’s mercurial governance, creating a volatile environment where billion-dollar companies operate at the mercy of presidential whims.

A September 4 White House dinner epitomised the awkward dance between tech and Trump. Thirty-three Silicon Valley leaders gathered in the State Dining Room after weather forced the cancellation of a Rose Garden event. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Apple’s Tim Cook, Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Google’s Sundar Pichai – nearly every major figure attended. (Notably absent was Elon Musk, whose public falling out with Trump earlier in the year had made him persona non grata.)

Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, turns around before President Donald Trump’s speech at a dinner last month in the State Dining Room of the White House. Credit: AP Photo/Alex Brandon

In what The Wall Street Journal described as “a version of his cabinet meetings”, each executive took turns thanking and praising Trump. Cook announced Apple would invest $US600 billion in the US, telling Trump: “I want to thank you for setting the tone such that we can make a major investment in the United States”. Altman declared: “Thank you for being such a pro-business, pro-innovation president. It’s a very refreshing change”.​

The mood was reportedly upbeat, optimistic – a celebration of partnership between government and industry. Then, just 16 days later, Trump signed the H-1B proclamation.​

The $US100,000 fee represents a seismic shift for an industry built on global talent. Amazon employed more........

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