Tim Cook, Sam Altman, and more attend Trump’s UK state banquet

Prime tech names had been on the visitor checklist for the banquet thrown for President Trump throughout his second state go to to the U.Ok. on Wednesday. 

The banquet seating chart included Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang; Apple CEO Tim Cook dinner; enterprise capitalist and White Home AI and crypto czar David Sacks; Alphabet and Google president Ruth Porat; Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella; Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff; and OpenAI’s Sam Altman, in line with the New York Occasions.

On Thursday, the U.S. and U.Ok. signed a partnership known as the Tech Prosperity Deal to deal with growing nuclear, AI, and quantum applied sciences. Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, and OpenAI additionally made bulletins earlier this week to construct knowledge facilities within the U.Ok., whereas CoreWeave and Salesforce introduced a multibillion-pound funding within the nation. Total, American tech corporations dedicated a complete of £31 billion ($42 billion) to spice up AI infrastructure within the U.Ok.

This state banquet visitor checklist appears to have featured extra tech and enterprise names than the Hollywood varieties that always attend such affairs.

This alteration reveals the shifting financial wants of the U.Ok. and U.S. within the age of AI, in addition to the rising prominence of expertise and its leaders in Trump’s second administration. Simply this previous 12 months, quite a few Large Tech firms like OpenAI, Google, and Apple have pledged to work with the federal government, from offering AI assistant instruments to authorities companies to constructing digital well being ecosystems for the U.S. well being trade.

The president has additionally taken a sharper deal with tech — criticizing Tim Cook dinner for Apple’s outsourced provide chain, signing an “anti-woke” AI order, and instructing the legal professional normal to research non-public firms receiving federal funds which have DEI applications deemed “unlawful.”

Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and different tech leaders attended the president’s inauguration this 12 months. And, in early September, President Trump threw a tech dinner with 33 high names in Silicon Valley, together with Altman, Cook dinner, and Zuckerberg. Musk, a former senior adviser to the president, as soon as referred to as “First Buddy,” was not current at both dinner.