Google donated $1 million to President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration fund, becoming the latest major tech company to try and curry some goodwill with the incoming administration.

“Google is pleased to support the 2025 inauguration, with a livestream on YouTube and a direct link on our homepage. We’re also donating to the inaugural committee,” Karan Bhatia, Google’s global head of government affairs and public policy, told CNBC in a statement.  

The company made its donation on Monday. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Meta both announced $1 million donations to the inaugural fund late last year, and Amazon and Apple CEO Tim Cook have also reportedly contributed.

After a candidate wins the presidential election in the U.S., they appoint an inaugural committee to organize and finance inaugural events like the opening ceremonies, galas and the parade. Unlike a direct contribution to a candidate’s campaign, there are no limits on how much an individual — or a corporation or labor group — can give to an inaugural committee.

Google has donated to inaugurals in the past, and the YouTube livestream and link to the inauguration on Google’s homepage are in line with previous inaugurations, a spokesperson said.

Trump has had a rocky relationship with major tech companies over the years, and he has not shied away from criticism of the sector following the election. He signaled late last year that he wouldn’t rule out antitrust enforcement, which is a particularly sore spot for Google.

A federal U.S. judge ruled in August that the company has illegally held a monopoly in search and text advertising. Arguments in a second antitrust case about Google’s advertising business closed in November, though a verdict has not yet been announced.

“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 wrote in a Dec. 4 post on Truth Social. 

Google CEO Sundar Pichai and former Alphabet President Sergey Brin met with Trump after the election, and Pichai publicly congratulated the president-elect on his “decisive victory” in a post on X.

— CNBC’s Kevin Breuninger contributed to this report

Amazon has turned into an online ad juggernaut in recent years, with brands paying big bucks for premium placement on the retailer’s websites. Now, Amazon is letting other sites use its ad technology for their own stores.

The new offering, called Amazon Retail Ad Service, allows companies to show “contextually relevant ads in the right place and at the right time” in search results, product pages and other areas of their site, Amazon said Thursday.

It’s initially available for U.S. retailers, which will pay fees based on usage levels. Prices weren’t disclosed.

Amazon in 2022 began breaking out ad revenue in its quarterly earnings reports, showing that the business had become a significant contributor to the company’s top and bottom lines. Ad revenue in the latest quarter came in at $14.3 billion, third to Alphabet and Meta in digital advertising.

That’s still much less than the sales Amazon generates from online stores and cloud computing, which came to $61.4 billion and $27.4 billion, respectively, in the quarter that ended in October.

The bulk of Amazon’s ad revenue comes from sponsored product advertisements, which are keyword-targeted ads that let brands promote certain items. Amazon has stuffed more of these sponsored items into search results and product pages over time. It also generates some ad revenue through streaming.

With Amazon Retail Ad Service, users will be able to customize the design, placement and number of ads shown across their sites, as well as use Amazon’s ad measurement and reporting tools.

Amazon said the service operates on systems that are separate from its own retail business, and retailers manage their data via AWS accounts.

The service could provide Amazon with valuable data it can use to bolster its ad prediction and recommendation technology. The company said early customers include health and wellness retailer iHerb, Asian grocery startup Weee! and Oriental Trading Co., which sells toys, party and craft supplies.

“We’ve designed this to be a win for retailers, advertisers, and shoppers, and we look forward to seeing how it improves outcomes, drives sales and enhances the shopping experience,” said Paula Despins, vice president of Amazon Ads Measurement, in the press release.

The announcement comes a few days before the National Retail Federation’s annual trade show.

It’s not the first time Amazon has sold its in-house technology and services to third parties.

Amazon Web Services began as cloud infrastructure to support its online retail business. The company launched AWS as a business in 2006. In 2022, the company launched Buy With Prime, which combines Amazon’s payment and fulfillment services for other retailers.

Cohere co-founder Nick Frosst is surrounded by chatter of artificial general intelligence, or AGI. He’s perfectly happy to stay out of the conversation.

Founded in 2019, by ex-Google AI researchers, Cohere is valued in the billions of dollars and is one of the more high-profile names in the world of generative AI, which has exploded since OpenAI debuted ChatGPT in late 2022.

But it’s not a company that’s well known among consumers, who have swarmed to chatbots and other tools from OpenAI, Google and Perplexity. Rather, Cohere is all about business.

“I’m in meetings with companies in health care, banking and IT all the time,” Frosst told CNBC in an interview this week. “The questions I get are about securely automating tasks like HR, payrolls, research and fraud detection to drive productivity. No one has ever asked me about achieving AGI, let alone ASI.”

The latter is short for artificial superintelligence, or AI that significantly surpasses human intelligence. OpenAI and Anthropic have both made it their goal to achieve it.

In its latest funding round in July, Cohere raised $500 million at a $5.5 billion valuation, more than doubling its valuation from the prior year. Investors in the company include Nvidia, AMD, Salesforce and Oracle.

While that would historically be a huge price tag for a company that’s not even five years old, it’s a fraction of what investors are paying for OpenAI, valued at $157 billion in a round announced in October, and Anthropic, which CNBC confirmed this week is in talks to raise funding at a $60 billion valuation.

Some of Cohere’s chief competitors in the AI arms race offer products for both consumers and businesses. OpenAI, for instance, launched ChatGPT Enterprise in 2023, and Anthropic rolled out Claude Enterprise in September.

Frosst said Cohere’s preference for the enterprise is centered around the idea that large language models are best at automating tedious tasks and “being a co-worker.”

“Really, it’s an automation tool,” Frosst said. “When I think about my personal life, there’s actually not a ton that I want to automate. I don’t want to write text messages to my friends faster. I don’t want to respond to emails more efficiently in my own life. But in my work life, I really, really do want to do that.”

Frosst said, “I want to be free to think creatively and not be bogged down.”

Shortly after closing its funding round in July, Cohere cut about 20 jobs. A company representative said at the time it was an “internal realignment” and that Cohere had a “clear vision for the future.”

That vision includes going all-in on AI agents.

While the term AI agents isn’t neatly defined, it’s generally meant to describe AI services that go a step beyond chatbots. Agents are typically designed for specific business functions, rather than general purpose, and can be customized on the big AI models.

They can perform multistep, complex tasks on a user’s behalf and generate their own to-do lists, so that users don’t have to walk them through the process step-by-step.

Martin Kon, Cohere’s operating chief, told CNBC in March that by staying focused on enterprise AI, the company is able to run efficiently and keep expen under control even amid a chip shortage, rising costs for Nvidia’s graphics processing units (GPUs) and ever-changing licensing fees for AI models. 

Frosst says those dynamics are still at play, allowing Cohere to be “more capital-efficient,” which is increasingly “of interest to investors.” Rivals with popular consumer-facing AI products, he said, use a lot of compute on “consumer applications and science projects.”

Although the sales cycle for enterprise AI can be longer, Frosst said, “the recurring business we’ve been able to create is something that’s really resonating with investors now.”

Competition is stiff and the technology is quickly evolving.

In October, Anthropic said its AI agents had the ability to use a computer like a human would in order to complete complex tasks. The feature, called Computer Use, allows its technology to interpret what’s on a computer screen, select buttons, enter text, navigate websites and execute tasks through any software and real-time internet browsing.

OpenAI reportedly plans to introduce a similar feature soon. And last year, executives from Microsoft, Meta and Google regularly touted their goals to push AI assistants to become increasingly productive.

Even without a consumer business, Cohere has to spend heavily on Nvidia’s costly GPUs, which are in huge demand for companies that are training models and running big workloads. In Cohere’s early days, the company secured a reserve of Google chips to help it pretrain its models. Over the past year, Cohere has moved more toward Nvidia’s H100 GPUs.

“We’ve increased our spend on them, because they’re working really well,” Frosst said.

WATCH: Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez on how his AI models make money for companies