Companies are trying to get trumps attention by calling old projects, America first investments

American companies are promising to spend hundreds of billions of dollars in the United States as President Donald Trump deploys tariffs to promote domestic manufacturing, a gush of investment plans that the White House compiled on a new webpage titled The Trump Effect.

Trump’s policies “have sparked trillions of dollars in new investment in U.S. manufacturing, technology, and infrastructure,” the site declares. And if they come to fruition, some corporate plans would represent a powerful increase in investment and potential jobs.

But a review of the promised spending reveals that some companies committed to their investments previously, including under the Biden administration. Some are part of regular, ongoing business costs. Others lack specific commitments.

The list includes multibillion-dollar manufacturing pledges from multiple drug companies, which are engaged in a furious lobbying effort to blunt the effect of Trump’s threat to impose tariffs on imported pharmaceuticals. Other outlays range from $500 billion investmentsfrom tech giants Apple and Nvidia at the high end to relatively tiny investments, such as plans by LGM Pharma, a private-equity-owned contract manufacturer, for a $6 million plant expansion outside Houston.

“It’s been in the planning phases for about two years,” Hamilton Lenox, LGM Pharma’s chief commercial officer, said in an interview, driven by customer demand rather than tariffs. He acknowledged feeling “a little bit” surprised to see the company’s investment included on the White House list, which has “given us a bit of a boost.”

“We do fully support the goal of bringing manufacturing back to the U.S.,” Lenox said. “We’re happy to see interest in U.S.-based manufacturing again.”

The White House said unprecedented investment is flooding back to the United States.

“The difference between empty hypotheticals and real investments is having President Trump, the dealmaker-in-chief, back in office,” said White House spokesman Kush Desai. “By slashing regulations, lowering energy costs, enacting tariffs, and closely coordinating with the private sector, the Trump administration is securing trillions in historic investment commitments for the long-term restoration of American Greatness.”

The blizzard of press releases from pharmaceutical companies announcing new production within U.S. borders has followed years of criticism by Trump and other political leaders about moving operations overseas. Companies source raw ingredients as well as finished drugs overseas, saving money on labor and materials as well as taxes.

“I have not seen anything in the recent historical record going back at least 25 years” approaching the flurry of planned pharmaceutical investments, said Clifford Rossi, a business professor at the University of Maryland. He said he doubts it is motivated by tariffs because companies typically use a long time horizon when spending billions of dollars.

“The timing of this feels a little odd, almost like a bandwagon effect,” he said.

In responding to questions about pharmaceutical tariffs, Trump has floated rates from 50 to 200 percent, though analysts widely expect something closer to the 25 percent duty imposed on the automotive companies. Some executives and analysts say the administration’s focus is primarily on national security and ensuring access to critical medicines.

Eli Lilly credited the first Trump administration’s 2017 tax cuts in announcing in February it would spend $27 billion on new domestic plants, saying “it is essential that these policies are extended this year.” CEO Dave Ricks told financial analysts on Thursday that the company supports boosting domestic investment but “we don’t believe tariffs are the right mechanism.”

Although the White House lists Johnson & Johnson’s plans to spend $55 billion on new domestic manufacturing over the next four years, it works out to about an $11 billion increase over the previous four years. It also includes some projects that were already in the works, such as a $2 billion-plus investment in a North Carolina plant announced last October.

For Switzerland-based Novartis, the announcement last month that it would spend $23 billion over five years to expand its U.S. manufacturing prompted questions from some financial analysts. If the massive expansion “was an inevitable pivot regardless of the U.S. president, then why didn’t it start sooner?” Steve Scala, an analyst at T.D. Securities, asked when the company reported its quarterly profits on Tuesday.

“You’re right, we should have recognized it sooner, but now we have recognized it,” replied CEO Vasant Narasimhan, according to a transcript compiled by S&P Global Market Intelligence. “And I think independent of who’s president, it’s prudent for us to be able to have our supply chain stable inside the United States.” A company spokesperson didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Tech companies top the White House’s list with the biggest commitments to investing in the U.S. But much of the spending was already planned before the election, and for some of the companies involved is mostly made up of their regular business expenses rather than major new investments.

Apple, for instance, said in February that it would spend $500 billion in the U.S. during Trump’s term, but the bulk of that money constitutes the regular cost of running its business. Some of the investment will go toward building a production line for AI computer servers in Houston, but the company has not made any commitments about moving the production of any of the products it sells to consumers to U.S. factories. The company made a similar announcement the first time Trump was president.

The Trump administration exempted smartphones and personal computers from the government’s punishing tariffs after lobbying from Apple CEO Tim Cook. Spokespeople for Apple did not return a request for comment.

Another pledge to spend $500 billion — for new data centers to power artificial intelligence programs — came from ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, Japanese conglomerate SoftBank and business software giant Oracle, whose executives joined Trump in the White House on his first day as president to make the announcement.

But it’s unclear when or how the money will be spent. The companies said in January they plan to spend $100 billion “immediately,” but they are still in negotiations with various states about where to place the new data centers. It’s also unclear where the $500 billion is going to come from. Oracle has about $17 billion in cash on its balance sheet as of the end of February, according to financial filings. OpenAI recently raised $40 billion. Liz Bourgeois, a spokesperson for OpenAI, declined to comment.

On Tuesday, IBM said it would spend $150 billion in the United States over the next five years. IBM also made commitments the first time Trump was president. In December 2016, a month before he was first inaugurated, IBM’s then-CEO, Ginni Rometty, said the company would spend $1 billion training 25,000 new workers inside the U.S.

IBM spokesman Adam Pratt said the company hired 30,000 workers in the U.S. during the first Trump administration.

The Trump Effect list includes what the administration says is a plan by Stellantis, the major automaker, to spend $5 billion on U.S. manufacturing, including reopening a shuttered plant in Belvidere, Illinois, to make pickup trucks. The company committed to that project during union negotiations in 2023, according to the United Auto Workers, then announced it might delay the opening in August and later affirmed its original plan to open in 2027. The union attributed the move to a change in corporate leadership at Stellantis, not to Trump.

Stellantis did not respond to questions about the investment or how much of it was planned before Trump took office. The company shared a letter sent to employees about a meeting Stellantis Chairman John Elkann had with Trump just before the inauguration. “John told the President that building on our proud, more than 100-year history in the U.S., we plan to continue that legacy by further strengthening our U.S. manufacturing footprint and providing stability for our great American workforce,” the letter reads.

Schneider Electric, which helps build energy systems that power data centers, announced in late March that it would invest $700 million in the U.S. to support “energy & AI sectors and job growth.” But an analysis by the research firm Atlas Public Policy highlights a $280 million investment in clean tech that Schneider announced during the Biden administration. The company said the investments supplement “$440 million already announced since 2020 to strengthen its U.S. supply chain.”

Schneider did not respond to requests for comment.

Trump is also taking credit for spurring $19 million in new manufacturing capacity at the first large-scale bicycle frame manufacturing plant in the United States, in Seymour, Indiana. One of the most prominent backers of the company, Guardian Bikes, is venture capitalist Mark Cuban, who has been critical of the president’s tariff policies. Plans for the expansion were in the works long before Trump returned to office.

But Cuban said in an email that steel tariffs Trump implemented during his first term did play a role in the decision to build in Seymour. Guardian’s expansion plans were jeopardized by tariffs in Trump’s first term, prompting Cuban and other investors to press the company on how it might re-shore its manufacturing domestically. “I actually had discussions with Navarro about it,” Cuban said, referring to Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro, who has reprised his role from the first term.

“So this entire path, while inflationary for sure, was a direct result of the tariffs of Trump 1 and has continued through the last 5 years,” Cuban said. “And their business is booming.”

Guardian got its initial break on the TV program “Shark Tank,” after which Cuban became an investor. He cautioned that tariffs haven’t worked out that way for other companies featured on the show.

“If you go through the list of ‘Shark Tank’ companies that sell products, most are getting crushed right now by tariffs and aren’t in a position to manufacture here,” Cuban said.