Top tech names were on the guest list for the banquet thrown for President Trump during his second state visit to the UK on Wednesday.
The banquet seating chart included NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang; Apple CEO Tim Cook; venture capitalist and White House 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, according to the New York Times.
On Thursday, the US and UK signed a partnership called the Tech Prosperity Deal to focus on developing nuclear, AI, and quantum technologies. Google, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and OpenAI also made announcements earlier this week to build data centers in the UK, while CoreWeave and Salesforce announced a multi-billion-pound investment in the country. Overall, American tech firms committed a total of £31 billion ($42 billion) to boost AI infrastructure in the UK.
This state banquet guest list seems to have featured more tech and business names rather than the Hollywood types that often attend such affairs.
This change reveals the shifting economic needs of the UK and US in the age of AI, and the rising prominence of technology and its leaders in Trump’s second administration. Just this past year, numerous Big Tech companies like OpenAI, Google, and Apple have pledged to work with the government, from providing AI assistant tools to government services to building digital health ecosystems for the U.S. health industry.
The president has also taken a sharper focus on tech — criticizing Tim Cook for Apple’s outsourced supply chain, signing an “anti-work” AI order, as well as instructing the attorney general to investigate private companies receiving federal funds that have DEI programs deemed “illegal.”
Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and other tech leaders attended the president’s inauguration this year. And, in early September, President Trump threw a tech dinner with 33 top names in Silicon Valley, including Altman, Cook, and Zuckerberg. Musk, a former senior advisor to the president, once known as “First Buddy“, was not present at either dinner.
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