Inside Trump's Xi dinner: Which tech CEOs attended
Nvidia's Huang, AMD's Su and Musk sat near Trump and Xi as AI safety and chip trade dominated the table talk
Donald Trump's Thursday night dinner for Xi Jinping looked less like a diplomatic formality and more like a Silicon Valley roll call. AMD’s Lisa Su, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Tesla’s Elon Musk, Google’s Sundar Pichai, and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos made an appearance at the White House amidst the delicate truce between Washington and Beijing.
Trump’s very own table had its story to tell. Anticlockwise from the president were seated Melania Trump, Musk, Su along with her husband Daniel Lin, Huang and his wife Lori Huang, former CEO of Apple Tim Cook, China’s first lady Peng Liyuan, and Xi himself.
VP JD Vance and Usha Vance were sitting somewhere else at the venue, a seating arrangement that had chipmakers closer to the leaders than politicians.
Altman was seen chatting with Zuckerberg, whose public positions on AI safety diverge sharply. Altman has pushed for shared industry standards, including agreed triggers for slowing model development, while Zuckerberg has argued labs can be trusted to police their pace.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who has called for stricter safety rules, did not attend.
As Nvidia's CEO Huang presides over the table for a company still suffering the after-effects of last year’s H20 export regulations that cost them $2.5 billion in lost sales and $4.5 billion worth of stock, Musk, who runs a Gigafactory in Shanghai that manufactures nearly half of all of Tesla’s sales worldwide, has mentioned peer-reviewed testing of AI models between the two countries.
Bezos was there representing a company that stayed out of China's consumer market but now ships their goods via three Chinese ports.
