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President-elect Donald Trump on Wednesday tapped Gail Slater, an antitrust veteran and economic adviser for JD Vance, to lead the Department of Justice’s antitrust division and take charge of a full docket of blockbuster monopoly cases against companies including Google, Visa and Apple.

Slater is expected to continue the department’s crackdown on Big Tech, including cases brought during Trump’s first term in the White House, Trump wrote in a post on his social media platform.

“Big Tech has run wild for years, stifling competition in our most innovative sector and, as we all know, using its market power to crack down on the rights of so many Americans, as well as those of Little Tech!” Trump said.

Slater served on the White House’s National Economic Council in 2018, where she worked on Trump’s executive order on national security concerns over Chinese telecommunications equipment.

Before joining Vance’s office, Slater worked at Fox Corp. and Roku.

Vance, the vice president-elect, has said antitrust officials should take a broader approach to antitrust enforcement, and praised the work of Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan.

Slater grew up in Dublin, Ireland, and began her law career in London at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, which brought her to Washington.

She spent 10 years at the FTC, first as an antitrust attorney where she brought cases to block mergers including Whole Foods’ acquisition of organic grocer Wild Oats, and later as an adviser to then-commissioner Julie Brill, who later became an executive at Microsoft.

Slater also represented Big Tech companies including Amazon and Google at a now-defunct trade group called the Internet Association.

She is still viewed as an antitrust hawk among Washington tech skeptics, who welcomed her appointment.

Garrett Ventry, a former adviser to Republicans in Congress and founder of GRV Strategies, said Slater’s nomination shows Trump is “serious about taking on Big Tech.”

“Antitrust enforcement is here to stay,” Ventry said.

The Tech Oversight project, a group that backed the work of Biden’s DOJ antitrust chief, Jonathan Kanter, said the nomination shows antitrust has staying power as a bipartisan political issue.

“Gail Slater is a strong candidate to continue that work,” said Sacha Haworth, the group’s executive director.

Slater will take over a number of high-profile cases in which some of the world’s largest companies are accused of illegally building and protecting monopolies.

Trump said Slater will “ensure that our competition laws are enforced, both vigorously and FAIRLY, with clear rules that facilitate, rather than stifle, the ingenuity of our greatest companies.”

The appointment would put Slater in charge of the DOJ’s bid to make Google sell off its Chrome browser and take other measures to curb its dominance in online search.

The DOJ filed the case in 2020, during the first Trump administration. But the proposals for fixes came under Kanter.

The judge overseeing the case has said Trump officials will not get extra time to reevaluate the proposals ahead of an April trial.

Google faces a second battle with the DOJ over its online advertising technology, while Apple faces allegations that it monopolized the US smartphone market.

Kanter also filed the DOJ’s first case alleging algorithmic price fixing against property management software company RealPage.

In another case, the DOJ is seeking to break up LiveNation and TicketMaster over practices that prosecutors say harm eventgoers and artists.

Slater would have wide latitude over the cases, though most are also being pursued by bipartisan state coalitions.

A case the DOJ brought in September alleging Visa unlawfully dominates the market for debit card payment processing does not involve state antitrust regulators.

Slater would also be in a position to continue or end probes, such as an investigation into Nvidia, the chip company that rode the artificial intelligence boom to become one of the world’s most valuable companies.

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Technology

Texas Instruments’ stock falls on weak forecast

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Texas Instruments' stock falls on weak forecast

The Texas Instruments headquarters in Dallas, Texas, on Jan. 21, 2024.

N. Johnson | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Texas Instruments reported second-quarter results on Tuesday that beat analysts’ expectations for revenue and earnings. But the stock fell in extended trading due to a third-quarter forecast that missed estimates.

Here’s how the chipmaker did versus LSEG consensus estimates:

  • Earnings per share: $1.41 vs. $1.35 expected
  • Revenue: $4.45 billion vs. $4.36 billion expected

Texas Instruments said it expects current-quarter earnings between $1.36 and $1.60 per share, while analysts were looking for $1.50 per share. The company forecast revenue of $4.45 billion to $4.8 billion, for a midpoint of $4.625 billion. Analysts were expecting revenue of $4.59 billion.

Revenue increased 16% in the second quarter from $3.82 billion in the same period a year earlier. Sales in the company’s analog chip business, its largest, rose 18% to $3.5 billion, surpassing the StreetAccount estimate of $3.39 billion for the segment.

Net income rose 15% to $1.3 billion, or $1.41 per share, from $1.13 billion, or $1.22 per share, a year ago.

Texas Instruments is a key supplier of legacy semiconductors for automotive and industrial uses.

As of Tuesday’s close, Texas Instruments shares were up 15% for the year on broader market optimism for chips. In June, the company said it would spend $60 billion to expand chipmaking factories in Texas and Utah, a move that was praised by the Trump administration in its push to bring more technology manufacturing to the U.S.

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Environment

This $900 million solar farm in Texas is going 100% to data centers

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This 0 million solar farm in Texas is going 100% to data centers

Enbridge is going big on solar again in Texas, and Meta is snapping up all the solar power it can get.

Last month, Electrek reported that the Canadian oil and gas pipeline giant just launched its first solar farm in Texas. Now it’s given the green light to Clear Fork, a 600 megawatt (MW) utility-scale solar farm already under construction near San Antonio. The project is expected to come online in summer 2027.

Once it’s up and running, every bit of Clear Fork’s electricity will go to Meta Platforms under a long-term contract. Meta will use the solar power to help run its energy-hungry data centers entirely on clean energy.

The solar farm project’s cost is around $900 million. Enbridge says it expects Clear Fork to boost the company’s cash flow and earnings starting in 2027.

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Enbridge EVP Matthew Akman said the project reflects “growing demand for renewable power across North America from blue-chip companies involved in technology and data center operations.”

Meta’s head of global energy, Urvi Parekh, added that the company is “thrilled to partner with Enbridge to bring new renewable energy to Texas and help support our operations with 100% clean energy.”

Meta’s first multi-gigawatt data center, Prometheus, is expected to come online in 2026.

Clear Fork is part of a growing trend: tech giants like Meta, Amazon, and Google are racing to lock down renewable energy contracts as they expand their fleets of AI-ready data centers, which use massive amounts of electricity.


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Technology

Trump met with Amazon’s Jeff Bezos at the White House last week, sources say

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Trump met with Amazon's Jeff Bezos at the White House last week, sources say

Jeff Bezos, founder and executive chairman of Amazon, takes the stage during The New York Times’ annual DealBook Summit, at Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York City on Dec. 4, 2024.

Michael M. Santiago | Getty Images

President Donald Trump met with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos at the White House last week, CNBC has learned.

The meeting between Trump and Bezos, one of the world’s richest men, lasted for more than an hour, according to two people familiar with the matter who asked not to be named because the conversation was private.

Amazon declined to comment on the meeting. A spokesperson for Bezos didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The nature and exact timing of the visit couldn’t be learned.

A Gulfstream G700 private jet linked to Bezos landed in Dulles, Virginia, outside Washington, on July 14 before taking off the next day, according to Jack Sweeney, a programmer who tracks flight data from jets owned by Elon Musk, Bill Gates and others.

Bezos, who also owns rocket company Blue Origin, has cozied up to Trump during his second term in the White House. Trump frequently hurled insults at Bezos during his first term, largely because of the Amazon founder’s ownership of The Washington Post.

Read more CNBC Amazon coverage

Bezos joined a swath of tech CEOs on stage at Trump’s inauguration in January after donating $1 million to his inaugural fund.

The Trump administration praised Bezos for his decision to revamp the Post’s editorial pages to focus on “personal liberties and free markets.”

In April, Trump said Bezos, who stepped down as Amazon’s CEO in 2021, was “terrific” and “a good guy” after the billionaire assured Trump that the e-commerce giant had no plans to display tariff-related surcharges on its website.

More recently, Bezos has reportedly sought to capitalize on the dramatic falling-out between Trump and Musk, who spent more than $250 million to help Trump win a second White House term and previously led the government-slashing initiative called the Department of Government Efficiency.

Bezos competes with Musk, who is the CEO of SpaceX, through Blue Origin and Project Kuiper, Amazon’s low-Earth orbit satellite internet venture.

After Trump and Musk’s relationship soured, Bezos spoke with Trump on several occasions, while Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp traveled to the White House, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

The conversations centered in part on government contracts, according to the Journal.

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