Borrowing money becomes more expensive so companies will focus on their own needs (or surviving) rather than giving or outreach programs. Unlike Apple or NVIDIA most companies need to borrow money to stay in business.

> Borrowing money becomes more expensive so companies will focus on their own needs (or surviving) rather than giving or outreach programs.

All the (Big tech) companies - not just Apple and Nvidia - have higher revenues and profits now than they did during the Zero-interest regime. They are not hurting for money to fund outreach programs that meet their strategic goals.

What has changed is their hiring outlook. Online services saw unprecedented growth when everyone was cooped up in their homes due to Covid lockdowns, and the tech companies thought the growth would be permanent, rather than a temporary bump, and couldn't hire engineers fast enough to meet the anticipated growth: hence the outreach to non-traditional hiring-pipelines. After the layoffs, they stopped hiring aggressively and the labor market is now a buyers market

>Unlike Apple or NVIDIA most companies need to borrow money to stay in business

What do you mean by this?

> most companies need to borrow money to stay in business.

With respect, this is entirely untrue. Most companies don't need to borrow money. It's the functional cancer of the VC-funded silicon valley meta that needs to borrow money to do anything useful. Most corporations run based on what they earn. This is the only reasonable thing too, or every country would have the egregious debt load that the US has.

You can read "politically correct" as "politically fashionable".

When money is cheap it's easy to spend a bit of money on political signalling. However when money is no longer cheap that pure cost centre is the first on the list for cuts.