Trump's $100M grant for 70 AI startups — and the catch

The White House has awarded $100 million in grants to 70 AI companies through its CHIPS and Science Act, a program that started under Biden and is now running under Trump. The money targets companies that are building the physical stuff — chips, data centers, the hardware layer — not the apps on your phone.

The list was picked by a panel of industry leaders and academics, not by political connections. Many of the recipients are already well-funded Silicon Valley players: Palantir, Cerebras, Anduril, Mistral, Hugging Face. The grants are worth up to $5 million each.

This is the same CHIPS bill that funded TSMC's Arizona fab. The difference now is the political framing — the White House is calling it a national security play, and the optics are different with a different administration. But the money flows the same way: to the companies with the best technical teams and the most lobbying muscle.

Why this matters for us: this is American money going to tech companies that won't hire any of our people, and the political spin is just window dressing on a program that's been running since 2022.