Washington: US President Donald Trump hosted a high-profile dinner on Thursday evening at the White House, bringing together leading figures from the tech and artificial intelligence sectors. The event, originally planned in the newly renovated Rose Garden, was relocated indoors to the State Dining Room due to inclement weather.
Besides global CEOs such as Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), Tim Cook (Apple), Sundar Pichai (Google), Satya Nadella (Microsoft), and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, the guest list included prominent Indian-origin executives: Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella, Micron’s Sanjay Mehrotra, TIBCO Software’s Vivek Ranadive, and Palantir’s Shyam Sankar.
Other notable attendees comprised Google co-founder Sergey Brin, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, Oracle’s Safra Catz, Blue Origin’s David Limp, Scale AI’s Alexandr Wang, and Shift4 Payments’ Jared Isaacman.
Elon Musk conspicuously abstained from attending, following a public fallout with Trump earlier in the year. While Musk later claimed he had been invited but could not attend, a White House official reportedly said he wasn’t invited.
The dinner followed a White House task force meeting on AI education led by First Lady Melania Trump. During the dinner, President Trump posed a pointed question to each CEO: “How much are you investing in our country?” Zuckerberg and Cook both pledged $600 billion in U.S. investment through 2028; Pichai cited $250 billion; Nadella said up to $80 billion per year.
The evening focused heavily on AI’s role in America’s future, with the First Lady emphasizing that AI must be “responsibly shaped,” likening its development to raising children—with empowerment guided by vigilant oversight. Bill Gates spoke about leveraging American innovation in battling diseases like AIDS and polio, aiming for their eradication.
