The United States is suddenly looking less bubbly for European wines.

President Donald Trump on Thursday threatened a 200% tariff on European wine, Champagne and spirits if the European Union goes forward with a planned 50% tariff on American whiskey. Wine sellers and importers said a tariff of that size would essentially shut down the European wine business in the U.S.

“I don’t think customers are prepared to pay two to three times more for their favorite wine or Champagne,” Ronnie Sanders, the CEO of Vine Street Imports in Mt. Laurel Township, New Jersey, said.

Jeff Zacharia, president of fine wine retailer Zachys in Port Chester, New York, said 80% of the wine he sells is from Europe. Importers depend on European wines for a big part of their distribution system, he said, and there’s not enough U.S. wine to make up for that.

“This is just going to have a major negative impact on the whole U.S. wine industry in all aspects of it, including U.S. wineries,” he said.

Zacharia said there are so many unknowns right now he’s stopped buying European wine until the picture becomes clearer.

“It’s very hard to make preparations when as a business you don’t have a clear path forward,” he said. “Our preparations would be very different if it’s 200% compared to 100% compared to 10%.”

Wine and spirits from the 27-nation European Union made up 17% of the total consumed in the U.S. in 2023, according to IWSR, a global data and insight provider specializing in alcohol. Of that 17%, Italy accounted for 7% — mostly from wine – and French wine, cognac and vodka accounted for 5%.

Overall, the U.S. imports much more alcohol than it exports. The $26.6 billion worth of foreign-produced alcoholic beverages that entered the country in 2022 accounted for 14% percent of all U.S. agricultural imports, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The U.S. exported $3.9 billion worth of beer, wine and distilled spirits that year.

Marten Lodewijks, president of IWSR U.S., said a 200% tariff would not be unprecedented but import duties of that size tend to be more targeted.

In 2020, China imposed tariffs as high as 218% on Australian wine, which caused exports to plunge by 90%, Lodewijks said. China lifted the tariffs last year, but by then Australia’s wine industry had taken a big hit. Australia’s wine trade to China was worth 1.1 billion Australian dollars ($710 million) annually before the tariffs were put in place.

Europe’s tax on American whiskey, which was unveiled in response to the Trump administration’s steel and aluminum tariffs, is expected to go into effect on April 1. Trump responded Thursday in a social media post.

“If this Tariff is not removed immediately, the U.S. will shortly place a 200% Tariff on all WINES, CHAMPAGNES, & ALCOHOLIC PRODUCTS COMING OUT OF FRANCE AND OTHER E.U. REPRESENTED COUNTRIES,” Trump wrote. “This will be great for the Wine and Champagne businesses in the U.S.”

Trump was incorrect about the Champagne business. Champagne is a legally protected wine that can only come from France’s Champagne region. But U.S. winemakers — including Trump Winery, a Virginia winery owned by the president’s son Eric Trump — do make sparkling wine.

Reaction from across the Atlantic was swift Thursday.

“We must stop a dangerous escalation that is leading to a global trade war where the first victims will be U.S. citizens who will pay more for products, and with them, farmers,’’ Ettore Prandini, president of Italy’s Coldiretti agriculture lobby, said.

Italian wine exports to the U.S. – led by prosecco — have tripled in value over the last 20 years and reached 1.9 billion euros ($2.1 billion) last year. In France, the U.S. market for wines and spirits is worth 4 billion euros ($4.3 billion) annually.

Gabriel Picard, who heads the French Federation of Exporters of Wines and Spirits, said 200% tariffs would be “a hammer blow” for France’s alcohol export industry, impacting hundreds of thousands of people.

“Not a single bottle will continue to be expedited if 200% tariffs are applied to our products. All exports to the United States will come to a total, total, halt,” Picard said in an interview with The Associated Press.

French transporter Grain de Sail, which uses sail power to ship wines and other goods across the Atlantic, said Thursday that some winemakers had already cancelled planned shipments of wine to the U.S. because they were anticipating tariffs even before Trump’s announcement.

“It has more or less frozen exports. There’s no point even hoping to send wine to the United States under these conditions,” said Jacques Barreau, the firm’s co-founder.

Some U.S. wine stores saw an opportunity Thursday. In Washington, the wine bar Cork announced a tariff sale, encouraging regulars to come stock up on their favorite wines while they’re still affordable.

Others wondered aloud whether Trump would really go through with a 200% tariff.

“It changes by the hour now, right?” Mark O’Callaghan, the founder of Exit 9 Wine & Liquor Warehouse in Clifton Park, New York, said. European wines make up around 35% of sales at his store, he said.

Others seemed to want to stay out of the fray. Total Wine, which operates 279 stores in 29 U.S. states, didn’t respond to a request for comment Thursday. Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits, one of the country’s largest alcohol distributors, also didn’t respond to a message seeking comment.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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Wayan Vota knew something was wrong. 

A 20-year veteran of the international aid sector, Vota was long accustomed to industry changes following the inauguration of a new president—there is always a reset period during which agencies and contractors shift to align with the incoming administration’s priorities. But this time was different. 

Newly-inaugurated President Trump signed an executive order in mid January halting all foreign aid programs through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Vota anticipated a big shakeup at his firm, Humentum, which was predominantly funded by federal grants, and estimated that it would lead to layoffs for around 80% of the company. But Jan. 31 is when he found out he would also be included in those cuts, losing his job along with most of his colleagues.  

“I cried in my daughter’s arms,” he tells Fortune. “All of my peers, everybody who I would think of talking to, were also unemployed.” 

Vota is just one of thousands of federal workers and contractors who lost their jobs this year due to the Trump administration’s funding freezes, unprecedented resignation offers, and outright layoffs. Approximately 75,000 workers accepted the administration’s deferred resignation offer, and many more have been affected in other ways, with the promise of more pain to come. There is no official count for the total number of federal workers and contractors who have been laid off, but 62,530 government positions have been cut so far this year, according to global outplacement firm Challenger, Gray, & Christmas. Some areas have been more affected than others, and international aid has been particularly hard hit. 

After spending 24 hours cycling through various stages of grief following his layoff, Vota decided to take action. “I woke up and said: ‘Okay, I am not going to sit here and be a crying, blubbering mess. I’m going to get up and do something about it.’” 

On Feb. 1, he started a Substack called “Career Pivot,” with the aim of creating a community for laid off aid workers and helping them find new roles outside of the sector. He now has more than 9,000 subscribers, whose interests and specialities run the gamut from AI to health care and data analysis. Vota says that a large percentage are mid-to senior level staff who have spent the majority of their professional lives in the international development sector.

“There are people that spent a decade or 20 years within USAID, or got a master’s degree in International Development, joined the Peace Corps, then joined USAID, and just never worked anywhere else,” he says. 

‘Every single subscriber is somebody in pain’

Career Pivot is a combination of blog posts, FAQs, success stories, job listings, mental health resources, discussion boards, and networking events. 

It provides information and guidance to former federal employees and contractors searching for work, with an emphasis on highlighting expertise that could be valuable in another field, becoming marketable in the private sector, and sharing knowledge with others. “A huge part of Career Pivot is helping people translate their skills into terms the private sector understands,” Vota says. 

Articles on the site have headlines like “10 Ways to Rethink Your USAID Job Titles: How to translate your vast development experience into corporate-friendly terms,” “Resistance is NOT futile,” and “What are your health insurance options now?” 

Alex Collins, a public health social worker who specializes in maternal and child health, worked with Vota many years ago at a nonprofit. When she lost her job last month, she signed up for Career Pivot as soon as it went live. She says the site reinforced “how incredibly valuable not just our immediate networks of people are, but the networks that each of those people bring—a second tier of contacts.”

While the website was initially intended for international development workers, Vota says his subscriber base has grown to include impacted workers at other agencies, like the Department of Veterans affairs, and the Department of Education. 

Vota has a team of eight volunteers who assist him with the site, and offers both free and paid subscriptions. The latter cost $20 a month or $100 annually, and include more curated and personalized content, like “AMA” Zoom calls with recruiters where people can ask specific questions related to their job search. Vota says he’s using the money he makes to reinvest in the business. 

“My wife is very disappointed that at this point I’m a startup. All the money I’m making is going right back into services and processes and content for people,” he says. 

Finding community

Career Pivot certainly offers practical tools for job seekers, but many workers say the best thing they get out of it is a sense that they’re not alone.  

Laura Wigglesworth worked as a global health and development recruiter in the international development sector for 25 years, and lost her job as a result of the funding freeze. She was an early subscriber and has been participating in Vota’s workshops, learning things like how to optimize her resume with AI. Because of her professional experience, she’s also helping others navigate the job search process. 

“Job hunting is daunting and scary and lonely, and it can be very depressing,” she says. “Especially if you don’t have a support community of people going through what you’re going through.” 

That feeling is echoed by Joel Levesque, who lost his job as a federal contractor earlier this year when USAID funding dried up. He was working at government consulting firm Millennium Partners Consulting as an activity manager, and had four years left on his contract when he was fired on Feb. 24. Levesque launched his own Substack in February, where he provides people with guidance on how to leverage AI in the job search process. He now also works with Vota and Career Pivot via guest posts and AMAs. While he appreciates the comprehensive information site provides, he says it was not the main reason he subscribed. 

“What I found was that it was a community,” he says. “This was really quite a traumatic thing that happened for people actually working in the sector. I don’t think anyone was expecting this. So to be able to engage in a community where people are like me, and going through the same thing, really made me feel like I wasn’t crazy.” 

‘I can’t predict the future’

While many laid off federal workers are just beginning their job search, Vota is starting to see the results of his work. 

“I just had somebody email me today saying, ‘I’ve unsubscribed because I have a job.’ Oh, that was the most beautiful email ever! It made my entire day,” he says. His goal is for the average Career Pivot subscription to last three to six months, maximum. “I don’t want to have multi-year members. That would be a mark of failure, not a mark of success.” 

Many former international aid workers, including Vota, still hold out hope for the future of the sector, although they know it will look different. “USAID, as the agency we knew on January 20, will not exist in the future. Foreign assistance, which is the larger concept of helping other countries, will continue,” he says.

 How, exactly? He’s not entirely sure. it could be years before funding cuts are reversed. That may also depend on the outcome of the 2026 and 2028 elections. But Vota doesn’t have time to hold his breath. 

“I can’t predict the future, but I have the strong feeling that the majority of us have to find a new career just to stay alive.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

• Super Micro Computer, a Fortune 500 Silicon Valley tech giant that manufactures high-efficiency servers and data centers, is setting its sights on expanding in the Midwest and East coast regions and hopes to stave off the hit from higher prices due to President Trump’s tariffs, said CEO Charles Liang on Thursday. The company recently partnered with xAI and its Grok team to build a data center in Tennessee. 

Super Micro Computer is looking to turn the page after an arduous slog through a host of accounting and finance issues. The data center manufacturer is working toward a $40 billion revenue target and CEO Charles Liang announced plans to expand from its San Jose campus to new locations in the Midwest and East Coast. Super Micro is in talks with potential partners in the Middle East, he added. Liang spoke at the HumanX AI conference in Las Vegas this week.

He touted the Memphis data center, and said the company assembles its racks in San Jose before it ships components out to customers who can then “plug and play.” The company is a key piece of the AI ecosystem, and its fortunes have risen along with those of Nvidia, OpenAI, Anthropic and others as demand for data center servers needed for operating and training AI models has soared. Liang, who founded the company in 1993 with five people before it grew into a $23 billion Fortune 500 player, counts Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang as a friend, and Super Micro’s servers are packed with Nvidia’s highly coveted GPUs. 

In fact, the new 750,000 square foot xAI Colossus cluster Super Micro built for Elon Musk’s xAI Grok team counts 100,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs, the company said in a recent case study. 

“It took Elon and Super Micro only 122 days to finish,” said Liang, adding that it would usually take a year or longer to build such a data center. “He pushed me a lot, and he has high standards.”

And despite the aftermath of DeepSeek and China’s Manus AI, comingled with talk that companies will scale back on spending, Liang said what’s happening now is that the dynamic environment in tech is being brought back into “balance.”

Ultimately, however, he predicted demand will continue to surge over the next five to 10 years as companies seek the best, most efficient products. 

“This AI boom has been very big and AI now is so powerful,” said Liang. “But AI can be much more powerful, much faster, smarter, and more user-friendly…. There’s more room for AI to grow.”

He also noted that President Trump’s 25% tariffs on steel and aluminum imports aren’t likely to be as meaningful a hit to the company because it has kept its operations U.S.-based. Liang said the company also plans to leverage its footprint in Taiwan. One of its major contract manufacturers, Ablecom, is based in Taiwan along with its distributor, Compuware. The two companies’ CEOs, Steve Liang and Bill Liang, respectively, are Charle’s Liang’s brothers. 

Those and other related-party transactions led to a short seller report last year amid other accounting red flags that catapulted Super Micro into a financial-reporting gridlock in which it delayed its annual 10-K and quarterly financial filings. Its auditor EY quit in the middle of an engagement and Super Micro was in danger of being delisted from Nasdaq, which would have been the second time such a thing occurred. 

Last month, Super Micro issued belated annual financial reports and said its former accounting firm was to blame for the delay. The company has since been hit with at least five lawsuits and faces a probe from the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission. Super Micro is cooperating with regulators. 

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com