The Trump administration is increasingly on a collision course with the European Union over Big Tech fines.

Google, Apple and Meta are contesting fines from the EU over violations of the bloc’s antitrust and competition laws, which total over 6 billion euros, or $7 billion, since the start of 2024.

They’re an increasing bone of contention, as both companies and the White House say the fines reflect the bloc’s hostility to innovation, while the EU tells CNBC that its tough line is getting companies to make decisions that benefit consumers.

Six fines have been imposed since 2024:

• March 2024: Apple fined €1.84 billion under antitrust rules for abusing its dominant position in the market for the distribution of music streaming apps.
• November 2024: Meta fined €797 million under antitrust rules over practices benefiting Facebook Marketplace.
• September 2025: Google fined €2.9 billion under antitrust rules for anti-competitive practices in its advertising technology business.
• April 2025: Apple fined €500 million for failing to comply with “anti-steering” obligations. Meta fined €200 million under the Digital Market Act for requiring users to consent to sharing their data with the company or pay for an ad-free service.
• December 2025: X fined €120 million under the Digital Services Act for breaching transparency obligations.

“All companies doing business in the EU are accountable to the European people and should respect the rules meant to protect them,” a Commission spokesperson told CNBC, adding that fines would only relate to the conduct of firms’ operations in Europe that breach EU rules.

Donald Trump’s administration takes a different view.

It’s stepped up its criticism of the bloc, accusing it of over-regulating its tech firms and jeopardising Europe’s ability to benefit from the rise of AI.

In February, Trump signed a memorandum stating the U.S. would consider tariffs to “combat digital service taxes (DSTs), fines, practices, and policies that foreign governments levy on American companies.”

Fines against U.S. companies are the biggest source of friction on the economic relationship between the EU and the U.S., Under Secretary of State for Economic Growth Jacob Helberg told journalists last week, Reuters reported.

It’s not a new point of tension; Helberg also said that the EU had fined U.S. tech companies more than $25 billion in the past two decades.

“If the European Union is going to participate in the AI economy…They’re going to need data centers, data and access to the United States AI hardware stack, and you can’t overregulate and move the goal post on regulations and hit companies with huge fines,” U.S. ambassador to the EU Andrew Puzder told Ian King on CNBC’s “Europe Early Edition” on March 27.

When approached for comment on how EU Big Tech fines were impacting U.S.-Europe relations, a U.S. Department of Commerce spokesperson referred CNBC to a November interview with Secretary Howard Lutnick. “Let’s settle the outstanding cases,” he told Bloomberg. “Let’s put them behind us.”

There’s a difference in opinion on the other side of the Atlantic.

“Fines imposed under EU competition law, the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act serve, first as a penalty for breaking EU laws, and second as a deterrent to ensure that those EU laws are respected, both as a deterrent against re-offending for the company in question and to deter breaches by other market operators,” a Commission spokesperson told CNBC.

Europe is treading a line between being reliant on U.S. tech firms for much of its digital infrastructure — though governments are attempting to diversify tech suppliers and develop sovereign alternatives — and ensuring those companies adhere to its rules.

Meta changed its “pay or consent” offer to users of Facebook and Instagram in 2025 after a DMA non-compliance decision imposed a 200-million-euro fine, they said. The company would begin offering the new service to users at the start of 2026, the Commission said in a December statement.

When asked for comment, Meta directed CNBC to comments from Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan.

Kaplan said at the time that the EU’s fine was an attempt to “handicap successful American businesses,” adding that it “effectively imposes a multi-billion-dollar tariff on Meta while requiring us to offer an inferior service.”

Because the 6 billion euros in fines are being contested in court, the EU has not collected all of the money from companies in question, but fines are required by law to be covered by provisional payments or financial guarantees.

There are also several ongoing investigations by the European Commission into U.S. Big Tech companies.

In February, the Commission told Meta it intended to impose “interim measures” to stop it from excluding third-party AI assistants from WhatsApp as part of an ongoing investigation into the company.

The EU also opened formal proceedings in March to investigate whether social media platform Snapchat, owned by Snap, is in compliance with the Digital Services Act over online child safety.

Hello, this is Holly Ellyatt writing to you from London. Welcome to another edition of CNBC’s Daily Open.

Global markets will be on tenterhooks today after the White House said that U.S. President Donald Trump will deliver an address “to the nation to provide an important update on Iran” late on Wednesday evening.

The U.S. and Israel’s military operation against Iran is just over a month old but there’s a clear sense that war fatigue could be creeping in at the top, with Trump reportedly telling aides that he was willing to end the war without reopening the Strait of Hormuz.

Speaking of which, the president on Tuesday again lambasted European allies for not getting involved in the U.S.’ war, telling the U.K. and France to “Go get your own oil” from the Iran-blocked maritime passage.

Pace yourselves if you want to listen in to President Trump’s address on Wednesday giving an update on the Iran war — it’s set to take place at 9 p.m. ET — that’s 2 a.m. on Thursday London time.

“We leave because there’s no reason for us to do this,” Trump told reporters at the White House. “We’ll be ‌leaving very soon.” He also seemed to dismiss the idea of having to reach a negotiated settlement to end the war, signaling that the U.S. could just declare victory and end hostilities.

Global markets certainly like the idea of the war ending sooner rather than later: Asia-Pacific markets rebounded overnight while European bourses look set to rally at the open on Wednesday. U.S. stock futures also ticked higher on hopes that Trump is looking for an off-ramp to the war, which has sent global energy prices rocketing. Crude oil prices once again extended gains overnight.

We’ll have to wait and see what the president says later, but he’ll be mindful that this war has never had much support from U.S. voters and the majority want him to focus on domestic matters — ‘America First,’ remember?

Speaking of voting, the president signed an executive order on Tuesday cracking down on mail-in voting ahead of the 2026 midterm elections in November. The move did not go down well with voting-rights advocates, who warned it could disenfranchise millions of Americans.

It’s April Fool’s Day, so watch out for any news that seems too outlandish – I know, it’s getting harder these days.

— Holly Ellyatt

Oracle cutting thousands in latest layoff round as company continues to ramp AI spending

Microsoft just closed out its worst quarter on Wall Street since the 2008 financial crisis, as investors soured on the software giant’s prospects in artificial intelligence.

The company’s stock plunged 23% in the first quarter, a steeper drop than any of its tech peers or the Nasdaq, which fell 7% in the period. Microsoft bounced back a bit on Tuesday, alongside a broader market rally, with shares of the company gaining 3.3%, the biggest jump since July.

While Microsoft remains dominant in workplace productivity software and through its Windows operating system, the company is facing twin pressures to grow efficiently in AI while also building out its cloud AI infrastructure to support soaring demand.

Oil prices are surging because of the Iran war, potentially driving up costs for building and running data centers. And on the product side, Copilot, Microsoft’s AI assistant, has yet to show a lot of traction as users flock to competitive services from Google, OpenAI and Anthropic.

“Redmond is in a pickle,” wrote Ben Reitzes, an analyst at Melius Research, in a note on March 23, referring to Microsoft’s headquarters in Washington state. Reitzes, who has a hold rating on the stock, said the company has to use valuable capacity from its Azure cloud to fix Copilot, but has no choice “since Copilot is needed to maintain momentum in its most profitable and largest segment.”

Microsoft declined to comment.

Meanwhile, software stocks are getting pummeled as part of an AI-inspired “SaaSpocalypse” that has pushed names like Adobe, Atlassian and ServiceNow down more than 30% this year.

“Much of traditional SaaS is dying/in likely terminal decay,” Jason Lemkin, founder of SaaStr, wrote this week in a post on X, using the acronym for software as a service. In a blog post, he noted that earnings multiples for software trail the S&P 500.

Microsoft’s multiple hasn’t been this low since the fourth quarter of 2022, when OpenAI introduced ChatGPT, according to Capital IQ data.

Gil Luria, an analyst at DA Davidson, told CNBC that the sell-off isn’t justified, and he recommends buying shares. In the latest quarter, Microsoft reported revenue growth of almost 17%, accelerating from a year earlier.

“The dislocation in the fundamental performance of Microsoft and the stock performance of Microsoft, and the valuation of Microsoft, is the biggest it’s been in decades,” Luria said. He said he expects the company’s earnings growth to outpace the broader market this year.

“There is no stickier product in all of enterprise software than Microsoft Windows and Office,” he said.

Microsoft has been trying to build a larger revenue base from productivity software with the Microsoft 365 Copilot AI add-on, but so far, just 3% of commercial Office customers have licenses for it. Luria said he has access to 365 Copilot, but that he’s not a fan. More importantly, he said, Microsoft has pricing power with Office subscriptions. The company announced plans to raise prices in December.

With Copilot struggling to win over users, Microsoft said two weeks ago that Mustafa Suleyman, the former co-founder of AI lab DeepMind who had been running Copilot development for consumers, will focus on building AI models. Microsoft has tasked former Snap executive Jacob Andreou with leading the Copilot experience for consumers and commercial clients.

“Sure sounds like a demotion at best,” former Jane Street trader Agustin Lebron wrote on X. The change followed departures of prominent executives, including gaming chief Phil Spencer and Rajesh Jha, Microsoft’s highest-ranking productivity leader, who’s retiring.

Microsoft is still getting healthy growth out of Azure, which is second to Amazon Web Services in cloud infrastructure. Revenue in the division jumped 39% in the December quarter. Finance chief Amy Hood said in January that growth could have been in the 40s if the company had allocated all of its AI chips to Azure, rather than giving some to teams operating services such as Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Azure is benefiting from a massive backlog of business from OpenAI and Anthropic. Microsoft’s commercial remaining performance obligations at Azure more than doubled in the December quarter from a year earlier to $625 billion.

It’s a reminder that, among tech’s hyperscalers, Microsoft was viewed as an early mover in generative AI due to its 2019 investment in OpenAI and strategic partnership with the startup. But the companies no longer have an exclusive arrangement when it comes to cloud infrastructure and are now competing in a number of areas.

In February, OpenAI announced a service called Frontier that the company said “helps enterprises build, deploy, and manage AI agents that can do real work.”

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has been wearing a brave face, promoting the company’s AI enhancements on social media.

“It’s a lot of intense competition, but it’s not so zero-sum, as some people make it out to be,” he said in January.

Aaron Foresman, managing director of equity research at Crawford Investment Counsel, a Microsoft investor, said Nadella’s continuing presence is crucial for the company that he’s been leading since replacing Steve Ballmer in 2014.

“We’ve got a lot of trust and confidence in Satya,” Foresman said.

WATCH: Bank of America’s Tal Liani talks reinstating Microsoft as a ‘buy’

Salesforce shares tumbled 5% in extended trading on Wednesday after the customer service software maker reported healthy results, although its fiscal 2027 revenue view trailed Wall Street projections.

Here’s how the company did in comparison with LSEG consensus:

• Earnings per share: $3.81 adjusted vs. $3.04 expected
• Revenue: $11.20 billion vs. $11.18 billion expected

Salesforce’s revenue grew 12% year over year in its fiscal fourth quarter, which ended on Jan. 31, according to a statement. It’s the company’s fastest growth rate in two years.

The company has allocated $50 billion for new share buybacks, “because these are some low prices,” CEO Marc Benioff said on a conference call with analysts. As of Wednesday’s close, Salesforce shares had fallen about 28% so far in 2026, while the S&P 500 index had gained 1%.

Net income of $1.94 billion, or $2.07 per share, increased from $1.71 billion, or $1.75 per share. Adjusted earnings per share excludes stock-based compensation expense, amortization of purchased intangible assets and restructuring costs.

Current remaining performance obligation, a sum of contracted but unrecognized revenue and unbilled amounts that will be recognized as revenue over the next year, came in at $35.1 billion. The figure was higher than StreetAccount’s $34.53 billion consensus.

Guidance for the fiscal first quarter included $3.11 to $3.13 in adjusted earnings per share on $11.03 billion to $11.08 billion in revenue. Analysts surveyed by LSEG were looking for $3.00 per share and $10.99 billion in revenue.

For the 2027 fiscal year, Salesforce called for $13.11 to $13.19 in adjusted earnings per share on $45.8 billion to $46.2 billion in revenue, which implies 10% to 11% growth. The LSEG consensus had $13.12 per share on $46.06 billion in revenue.

In recent weeks, investors have become increasingly worried that generative artificial intelligence models might dampen major software companies’ growth opportunities.

On Monday, IBM stock dropped 13% in its worst daily performance since 2000 after Anthropic published a blog post saying its Claude Code AI tool for developers can assist with modernizing code written in the Cobol programming language.

During the quarter, Salesforce released an AI-enabled Slackbot assistant in its Slack team communication app for paying clients. The company also completed its $8 billion Informatica acquisition and announced plans to buy marketing company Qualified. Informatica, a data management software company, contributed $399 million in revenue during the quarter.

The company now sees $63 billion in fiscal 2030 revenue, up from a target of over $60 billion it presented in October. Analysts polled by LSEG had been looking for $59.07 billion. The new number includes a contribution from Informatica.

Five customers of ServiceNow moved to Salesforce’s competing product for information technology service management during the quarter, Benioff said on the TBPN podcast on Wednesday.

Salesforce has been working to expand adoption of its Agentforce AI technology for automating customer service and other corporate functions.

The company said annualized Agentforce revenue exceeded $800 million in the quarter.

Morgan Stanley analysts, with the equivalent of a buy rating on Salesforce stock, said in a Monday note to clients that conversations with partners “continue to indicate we are in the early innings.”

Meanwhile, Salesforce is seeing a benefit from its stake in Anthropic, generating an $811 million gain on strategic investments in the quarter. That’s up from $96 million in the year-ago quarter.

“I think we just put another $100 million into the new round,” Benioff said. We’re [at] about $330 million into Anthropic invested. It’s almost about 1% of Anthropic. And believe me, I wish we had invested a lot more.”

Benioff said the company isn’t doing all that it can with debt.

“We’re just very under-leveraged on our balance sheet,” he said.

WATCH: Investors are paying less and less for software earnings these days, says Jim Cramer

Software stocks made a comeback on Tuesday after Anthropic hosted its enterprise agents event, where it revealed new partnerships, quelling some investor fears that the sector could be displaced by artificial intelligence.

The AI startup launched new updates to Claude Cowork that allow companies to integrate the productivity tool into a host of enterprise apps, such as Salesforce-owned Slack, Intuit, Docusign, LegalZoom, FactSet and Google‘s Gmail.

Organizations can also deploy customizable plugins across sectors like financial analysis, engineering and human resources, Anthropic said.

Salesforce shares jumped 4% following the Anthropic announcement while Docusign and LegalZoom each gained more than 2%. Thomson Reuters‘ stock surged more than 11% and FactSet shares rose nearly 6%.

Analysts at Wedbush Securities said in a Tuesday research note that Anthropic’s event showed the competition risk to software from AI is “overblown.”

They argued that models aren’t capable of replacing entire workflows that remain “deeply embedded” in software infrastructure.

“The reality is that these new AI tools will not rip and replace existing software ecosystems and data environments with these AI tools only as useful as the data it can reach,” the analysts wrote.

Anthropic’s recent product rollouts have sent software and cybersecurity stocks tumbling in recent weeks as investors digested the looming threat of AI tools to those business models.

CrowdStrike closed largely flat Tuesday, but many of those stocks climbed higher. Okta and Cloudflare rose about 2%. Zscaler and Tenable each gained about 4% and SentinelOne climbed 3%.

IBM shares sold off heavily on Monday after Anthropic touted a tool that could automate aspects of a programming language run on IBM’s computers. IBM’s stock rebounded Tuesday, climbing more than 2%.

— CNBC’s Ashley Capoot and Kate Rooney contributed reporting to this story.

Software stocks have been hammered in recent weeks as investors worry about threats from artificial intelligence. In the startup world, Canva has been among the highest fliers due to its popularity with designers, but that market is showing vulnerability, with larger rival Adobe down 30% so far this year.

As Canva reckons with dramatic changes in the market, the design software vendor is getting acquisitive. The company said Monday that it’s purchased two startups — Cavalry and MangoAI — that stand to help it challenge Adobe.

Cavalry, a four-person startup, sells subscriptions to software for creating two-dimensional animations. MangoAI is a stealth-mode company, whose technology can be used for creating short videos for advertising. Terms of the deals weren’t disclosed.

Cameron Adams, Canva’s co-founder and product chief, told CNBC that customers have been asking what the company can offer in motion graphics. Cavalry, which Canva has used for its own projects, has gained attention among designers on social media as an alternative to Adobe’s After Effects for some work.

Canva will continue to operate Cavalry for people to use and buy independently, while also incorporating the animation technology into the core Canva product and the Affinity application for professional designers. Canva bought Affinity in 2024 and made it free in October.

Amazon, ByteDance, Google, and OpenAI all have employees that are paying customers, according to Cavalry’s website.

Canva plans to incorporate MangoAI into the Canva Grow advertisement generator, which is available through its business tier at $250 per person per year. The MangoAI technology is able to track video performance and make recommendations.

“There’s a whole bunch that goes into creating the right video,” Adams said. That includes “being able to cut stuff down, being able to repurpose content from other campaigns and put it together, being able to take a great call to action that happens at the end of one video and then append it to the hook that happens in another video,” he said.

“Analyzing all of that across your campaigns is the full vision of Canva Grow, and Mango will help enable that,” Adams added.

Canva said it ended 2025 with over $4 billion in annualized revenue, up 36% from a year prior. Adobe reported $6.2 billion in revenue for the November quarter, up 10%. Adobe’s market capitalization stood at $101 billion on Monday, while Canva said in August that it had been valued at $42 billion in a secondary share sale, before the recent plunge in software stocks.

Adams said Canva has seen instances of people directing generative AI models to create content such as slide presentations and social media posts. But AI can’t do everything, he said.

“AI is great at getting you to 80%,” Adams said. “That last 20% where you’re confident that you can push this piece of content out and truly represent your brand and speak to your audience and achieve the goals that you want to achieve is vital to have, and that last 20% is really tricky to do.”

Canva, which now has over 5,000 employees, is not currently raising a new funding round, Adams said.

“Our revenue growth has not stopped, our user growth has not stopped, and the quality of our product is getting better and better with the inclusion of AI,” he said.

WATCH: Investors are paying less and less for software earnings these days, says Jim Cramer

Hyperscalers are significantly ramping up their AI capex spending — and increasingly using credit markets to fund it.

But investors say this shift is challenging mega-cap tech giants’ so-called ‘fortress balance sheet’ status, and rips up what they call the “unspoken contract” that kept speculative AI spending largely separate from debt markets.

After Amazon, Meta and Google-owner Alphabet all unveiled sizable increases in their full-year capex spending plans during earnings season, UBS data indicates that aggregated capex spend among AI hyperscalers could top $770 billion in 2026 — some 23% higher than previously expected.

In a Feb. 18 note, UBS credit strategists said such increases imply a $40 billion to $50 billion ramp-up in borrowing from hyperscalers, pushing public market debt issuance to between $230 to $240 billion this year.

Al Cattermole, fixed income portfolio manager at Mirabaud Asset Management, said this tilt toward the bond market is dramatically shifting the dynamic between hyperscalers and investors.

“For years, we’ve been told this AI spend would be funded by generated cash flow — that it is equity risk, it is speculative, and not to worry about it from a credit point of view,” Cattermole told CNBC in an interview.

“There now seems to be a change in the unspoken contract that while we would continue to lend to these businesses, really AI capex was still going to be equity or cash funded….By bringing capex spend into the debt markets, you now have the question of credit worthiness.”

Last September, Oracle tapped the bond market for some $18 billion in one of the biggest debt issuances on record. Others have rapidly followed, with Google-owner Alphabet recently issuing some $20 billion in debt, including a rare 100-year sterling-denominated bond.

“What if, in three years, these Nvidia chips get outstripped by a Chinese competitor, and I’m lending for five or eight years, and in year three, my data center is obsolete?” he said.