Just two months on from a cosy meeting of tech eggheads with the then US President-elect Donald Trump and it appears that rebel Silicon Valley is stirring again.
What’s more, it involves two of the most influential tech stocks, and one of them Wall Street’s biggest stock.
Top Wall Street listing Apple Inc (NASDAQ:AAPL) will in the coming months start assembling its lower-priced iPhone SE models at a contract manufacturer's plant in the southern Indian technology hub of Bengaluru, Reuters reported on Friday.
Apple's Taiwanese manufacturing partner Wistron Corp is setting up a plant in Bengaluru to focus solely on assembling iPhones.
To lower prices, Apple has been seeking to set up local production and has been in talks with the Indian federal government regarding issues such as tax concessions.
But the developments are sure to enrage US President Trump, who has mastered the art of pressuring companies into bringing production back home to the United States and defying the onslaught of globalisation as he attempts to secure US jobs.
Meanwhile, Facebook's (NASDAQ:FB) chief Mark Zuckerberg released a long letter on his social network page, lamenting the rise of isolationism and the backlash against globalization in the era of Trump.
When Facebook launched in 2004 supporting a more connected, global community was not controversial, he wrote.
"Yet now, across the world there are people left behind by globalization, and movements for withdrawing from global connection," wrote Zuckerberg. "There are questions about whether we can make a global community that works for everyone, and whether the path ahead is to connect more or reverse course."
But despite the December meeting in New York when Trump said he wanted to work with the tech sector to make it strong, he has initiated policies such as a travel ban which would stem immigration and make it harder for leading edge tech employers to garner the talent they feel they need to go abroad to find.
Facebook shares were 0.3$ lower at $133.42 on Friday, while Apple shares were up 0.2% at $135.58.