Microsoft pays the price of Donald Trump’s hostile policy against Europe

Microsoft refrained from outright endorsement of Donald Trump during the election campaign, yet it’s bearing the brunt of Washington’s hostility towards Europe.

While OpenAI co-founder and president Greg Brockman and xAI’s Elon Musk were pouring millions of dollars into the Trump 2024 presidential campaign, Microsoft and its founder, Bill Gates, were laying low.

Gates reportedly quietly donated $50 million to a nonprofit organization supporting Trump’s competitor, former Vice President Kamala Harris.

While Microsoft eventually joined the ranks of other major tech companies in donating $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund, neither the company’s CEO, Satya Nadella, nor Gates attended the event and made a snarky remark about his billionaire peers.

“You know they clearly wanted to fund the inauguration. They wanted it to be a great inauguration, for the good of the country, no doubt,” Gates said with a sarcastic smile on his face during his appearance on The View.

Gates has previously publicly criticized Trump over immigration, global health, and climate policies, but much of the criticism during the 2024 campaign reportedly stayed behind closed doors, likely out of fear of alienating customers, employees, and investors.

Despite being somewhat less associated with Trump, Microsoft now sees that national and regional governments across France, Germany, Austria, and Denmark have pledged to abandon, or already abandoned, its products.

European governments and enterprises may be troubled by sharp price increases for Microsoft products – the price of its MS365 office suite subscription rose by 42% in 2025 – but experts say geopolitics is to blame.

Mathilde Velliet, a research fellow at Ifri's Center for Geopolitics of Technology, says the switch from Microsoft to open-source software is mostly driven by the heightened perception that overreliance on American proprietary technologies is a strategic vulnerability.

“The willingness of the Trump administration to mobilize quite aggressively a wide range of levers in pursuit of its economic and foreign policy goals, often weaponizing European dependencies on the US, has forced Europeans to consider the risks inherent to their digital dependencies,” she tells Cybernews.

The relationship between Washington and European capitals has sharply deteriorated under Trump, who bashed European allies, waged tariff wars, and refused to rule out using military force against Denmark to take over Greenland.

This left Europeans rethinking their dependencies on the US in the fields of defense, economy, and digital sphere, among others. A recent Politico poll found that 84% of Europeans don't trust American tech companies to responsibly handle their data.

The willingness of the Trump administration to mobilize quite aggressively a wide range of levers in pursuit of its economic and foreign policy goals, often weaponizing European dependencies on the US, has forced Europeans to consider the risks inherent to their digital dependencies.

Mathilde Velliet

Mario Mariniello, a non-resident fellow at the Brussels-based think tank Bruegel, says the geopolitical landscape entirely motivates the shift from Microsoft to open-source.

He adds that some EU countries may be ready to face short-term challenges in order to nurture domestic solutions that may become fully viable in the future.

“Given that scale and network effects are really strong in this environment, smaller scale applications tend to be less efficient up until they are widely adopted,” Mariniello tells Cybernews.

Microsoft is paying the price

While European users left X, formerly Twitter, in droves after Musk took over in 2023, the number has started to bounce back in 2025, and the platform now has 102 million active users in the European Union (EU).

This is despite Musk’s attacks on the EU, calling for it to be abolished after the bloc imposed a €120M ($140M) fine on X for breaching transparency rules under its Digital Services Act (DSA), a comprehensive regulation of online platforms.

The number of ChatGPT users in Europe rose to 120 million, prompting the bloc to consider classifying it as a very large online platform, so it could fall under the DSA. OpenAI, however, is currently in hot water for donations to Trump and a contract with the Pentagon.

Contrary to X and ChatGPT, which are predominantly used by individual users, Microsoft products like Windows and the Microsoft 365 office suite are deeply embedded in critical European institutions, making them a natural target in a digital sovereignty bid.

For instance, the Austrian military and the German government are among the recent Microsoft quitters. The French government has just committed to replacing Microsoft with Linux across all civil servants’ desktops.

However, relations between Microsoft and the EU weren’t perfect even before. The company, along with other US tech giants, previously complained about the bloc’s regulations, although it chose a conciliatory approach where the stakes were high.

After the bloc accused Microsoft of illegally bundling its chat and video app Teams with its Office, the company avoided an unprecedented €561M ($661M) fine by committing to offer customers reduced prices for Office products excluding Teams in 2025.

No end for tensions in sight

Whether pledges to ditch American technologies will translate into action is yet to be seen. What is clear is that the tensions between Europe and the US will continue to boil.

Since 2024, the European Commission has issued more than €6B (around $7B) in antitrust fines to US big tech companies Apple, Google, Meta, and X.

Earlier this year, Trump signed a memorandum that foresees imposing tariffs on foreign governments to fight digital service taxes and fines against American companies.

At the same time, the Trump administration has directed diplomats to actively push back against foreign data privacy laws that could restrict US tech companies, Reuters reported in February 2026.

Meanwhile, Microsoft is trying to play according to the EU rules. In 2025, the company announced new European digital commitments, including building AI and cloud ecosystems across Europe and ensuring data privacy.

However, Europeans may not forget that just last year, Microsoft France’s legal director, Anton Carniaux, admitted under oath that he could not guarantee that the data of French citizens would never be transferred to the US without consent.

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