Tariffs pose price increases in all types of products. Digital services are not going to escape

On January 20, 2025 there were five very special guests to Donald Trump’s investiture ceremony. Were nothing less That Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai, Elon Musk and Tim Cook, the CEO or founders of five of the most important technology companies on the planet. Then things happened.

Billionaire losses. Three months later the companies of these five leaders have lost 1.26 billion dollars, An absolutely colossal figure. Donald Trump tariff All products that we buy and consume They rise appreciable.

The services are not safe. However, what will happen to digital services? Taking into account that they are intangible, almost ethereal products, one might think that they will be safe from those increases, but we fear that there will also be important increases in these services.

Infrastructure after service. The reason is clear: to provide these services services make use of data centersservers and components that will end up more. And if maintaining and providing these services costs companies more, it is logical to think that this cost increase will end up impacting users and customers.

Subscriptions more expensive than ever. Thus, it seems that we will end up paying (even) more for being able to use Netflix, Spotify, Microsoft 365 or, of course, our subscription to Chatgpt Plus. Here the dominoes will fall everywhere, and it is expected that the digital services that users and companies use daily rise.

We will buy less (and less imported products). As they point out In The New York Timesthere are outstanding examples such as internet payment intermediaries and of course electronic commerce platforms such as Amazon. If, for example, in the US, fewer people buy products imported from abroad – because tariffs will make them much more expensive – both Amazon itself and payment processing entities such as banks or services such as Paypall will suffer the consequences.

And the EU prepares tariffs for those services. One of the possible EU responses to the tariffs Trump has announced for member countries (20%, without differentiating by country) is that of impose tariffs to services exports by the Big Tech.

China exports goods, but USA exports services. The United States is the largest digital services exporter in the world. According to the analyst Jerry Ar P., in 2022 the United States exported digital services to Europe worth 187,000 million dollars, more than 25% of the total. Tariffs would clearly affect the US revenues due to these exports of digital services, and this consultant estimates that in 2022 these digital services represented 2.5% of the US GDP.

Unpredictable collateral effects. The implementation of these tariffs on digital services raises notable consequences for the US economy and, of course, for global finances. North American technological ones who nourish these exports would be the clear victims, and there would also be a direct effect on their templates not only in that country, but globally. The market capitalization of these companies would probably also fall, triggering clearly clear effects in all types of areas, not only at the economic level but also at the diplomatic level.

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In Xataka | The great technology built their empires in a connected world. Now that world is falling apart