How can American tech giants remain close to the US without distancing themselves from the rest of the world, and Europe in particular? That is one of the dilemmas they face. The sharp rise in transatlantic geopolitical tensions has changed how these global companies are perceived. It also risks straining their local relationships, especially with European Union member states. Under Donald Trump, the image of digital multinationals has become re-Americanized.

For several years, Big Tech companies had sought to present themselves as global enterprises. Executives at Meta, for instance, regularly reminded the public that more than 80% of Facebook users were outside the US. Today, the country remains “only” its second-largest market by user numbers, with 197 million, behind India with 384 million, according to analytics firm Kepios. Indonesia, Brazil and Mexico follow. Executives described the leading social media platform as a global group rather than an American company, as highlighted in a 2018 article by the Guardian during the controversies over personal data use in the Cambridge Analytica affair.

In a similar spirit, in 2020, Mark Zuckerberg created an international ‘Oversight Board’ tasked with issuing opinions on sensitive content moderation cases, structured along the lines of multilateral institutions (only five of the first twenty board experts were American). The founder of Facebook also chose to have his digital currency project, Libra, managed by an international consortium based in Geneva, Switzerland (the project never materialized).

‘Thank you,’ Donald Trump

More broadly, after being criticized in their early years for entering markets remotely without a serious local presence, digital giants from Meta to Google, along with Apple, Microsoft and Amazon, have strengthened their presence and sought to demonstrate investment in local “ecosystems” – especially in Europe – by establishing headquarters, data centers and sometimes research labs. This was a way to answer growing pressure from regulatory authorities concerned about their disruptive economic power and to reflect the importance of markets outside the US. In 2025, these markets accounted for only 39% of Meta’s revenue, compared to 23% from Europe, 26% from Asia, and 11% from “the rest of the world.”

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