The who’s who in tech showed up for Trump’s glitzy White House dinner with China’s leader

In clockwise order, Trump’s table consisted of himself, first lady Melania Trump, Musk, Su and her spouse, Daniel Lin, Jensen Huang and his spouse, Lori Huang, former Apple CEO Tim Cook, China’s first lady Peng Liyuan, and China’s leader Xi Jinping.

Vice President JD Vance and Usha Vance were seen seated at a different table to the right.

The two tech CEOs have both recently weighed in on AI safety issues, as the topic is expected to be discussed with China’s leader.

Altman has backed setting shared safety standards, including rules for when companies should slow or stop developing more powerful models, while Zuckerberg has said that AI labs have strong incentives to make their models safe and can decide for themselves when to slow down.

Dario Amodei, the Anthropic CEO who also led the call for more cautious AI development, is notably absent from the dinner.

Huang, dressed in more traditional business attire, was seated at the main table alongside Trump and Xi.

Nvidia has felt the tech rivalry between the US and China acutely over the past few years. After Washington imposed new export restrictions on Nvidia’s H20 chips in April 2025, the company said it missed out on $2.5 billion in shipments that quarter and took a $4.5 billion charge tied to unsold inventory and purchase commitments.

As recently as August, Nvidia was still assuming no China data center chip revenue in its forecast.

Musk and Brockman, who is the spouse of OpenAI cofounder and president Greg Brockman, are both heavyweight Trump donors.

Musk, in particular, holds major business interests in China due to Tesla’s Gigafactory in Shanghai, which produces about half of the automaker’s deliveries.

The world’s richest man said earlier this month, during a podcast appearance, that the US and China should agree to peer review or test AI models from the leading firms in each other’s countries.

Musk’s SpaceX is also arguably the single most important company to the US space race against China, providing the bulk of American orbital launches and maintaining the world’s largest satellite constellation.

The Google CEO was seen having an animated conversation with Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

Google, one of the leading AI labs in the US, is investing heavily in AI capacity, with a total capex forecast of $195 billion to $205 billion this year. That’s higher than most of the rest of Big Tech, except for Amazon, which estimates $220 billion in total capex in 2026.

Amazon doesn’t operate its marketplace in China, which has its own, far more domestically successful e-commerce platforms.

But the country has become a major supply and export hub for Amazon, to the point that the company built a global warehousing and distribution network this year in three major Chinese shipping ports to funnel goods to the US.

Bezos and Sánchez were just two representatives of America’s corporate elite invited to Thursday’s dinner — lead executives for BlackRock, JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, LVMH, and Lockheed Martin were also among those present.