Big Tech's big Trump tax win

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Big Tech is a big winner when it comes to President Donald Trump’s tax law that Republicans unilaterally muscled through Congress.

Google $GOOGL, Meta $META, Amazon $AMZN and Tesla $TSLA all belong to a cohort of large companies that are slashing their corporate tax bills this year as a result of the GOP tax law. It serves to provide a glimpse of how tax benefits are poised to flow to the largest companies, just as the Trump administration is touting bigger tax refunds for families that might look paltry by comparison.

“We know from a macro perspective any company filing their income taxes in 2025 that engages in any amount of R&D or capital spending is going to see some pretty substantial tax breaks,” Matthew Gardner, a senior fellow at the left-leaning Institute of Taxation and Economic Policy who has reviewed securities filings, told Quartz Washington. He estimates that $51 billion in profits from the four companies will go untaxed this year.

In this instance, Amazon stands out for merging swelling profits from one year to the next without paying more in federal tax. The company reported $89 billion in profits for 2025, a 45% jump from the prior year. Its 2025 tax bill, though, dropped to $1.2 billion from $9 billion in 2024. The effective tax rate amounted to 1.4%.

Last week, Amazon appeared to try to head off the usual cascade of attacks from Democrats that have long pointed at the company as a clear-cut example of one paying rock-bottom taxes.

“Last year Congress made changes to the tax code to encourage greater investment in the American economy, its innovation, and its workers,” the company said in a statement that accompanied the Securities and Exchange Commission filing. “Our tax bill this year reflects those changes by Congress.”

The tax law’s knock-on benefits for AI

Republicans in Congress delivered on one important item on corporate America’s wishlist that allowed companies to pay lower taxes to Uncle Sam: their ability to immediately deduct new domestic research and development spending from their tax bills instead of spreading them out over years.

Proponents argue that the provision — known as bonus or accelerated depreciation — enables companies to frontload capital spending, therefore juicing overall economic growth.

Trade groups like the Business Roundtable and the Chamber of Commerce intensely lobbied lawmakers to restore the provisions since it faded away in 2022. Previous attempts on Capitol Hill to revive the immediate deductions had faltered until last year, when Republicans prioritized it in unilaterally assembling their mammoth “One Big Beautiful Bill.”

So-called “accelerated depreciation” will have significant, knock-on benefits in the artificial intelligence world as well, if it’s not already. Now it’s easier for companies to deduct AI-related spending and maintain a cash flow that sustains the spree for the foreseeable future. Servers, networking equipment like routers and switches, and cooling equipment all qualify for full expensing.

Last year, Trump promoted accelerated depreciation as “the most important thing in the whole tax cut in terms of pure economics” in an AI policy speech.

Take Meta. In a December earnings call, Meta chief financial officer Susan Li said the company “will recognize significant cash tax savings for the remainder of the current year and future years under the new law.”

Meta reported in a recent security filing that accelerated depreciation slashed its federal tax obligations by $5 billion. The company announced in late January it planned to shell out $135 billion in capital expenditures this year, much of it devoted to constructing a network of AI facilities — nearly double the amount it spent in 2025.

More runway has been built for the AI revolution, and Big Tech companies can thank Trump's latest tax law as a reason why. Only time will tell whether that was a wise move.