When President Trump sat down for his second state banquet in the U.K. this week, the guest list was not filled with celebrities from Hollywood; it was loaded with some of the most powerful people in tech.
At the table: Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, Apple’s Tim Cook, Alphabet and Google’s Ruth Porat, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, Salesforce’s Marc Benioff, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, and venture capitalist David Sacks, who now doubles as the White House’s AI and crypto czar.
The timing wasn’t accidental. Just a day later, the U.S. and U.K. signed the Tech Prosperity Deal, a new partnership focused on advancing nuclear, AI, and quantum technologies. Alongside the political handshakes, American tech firms made their own splashy commitments: Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, and OpenAI all pledged to expand data centers in Britain, while CoreWeave and Salesforce unveiled multibillion-pound investments. All told, U.S. companies promised £31 billion ($42 billion) to boost the U.K.’s AI infrastructure.
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The lineup of banquet guests signals a shift. Where once the spotlight might have gone to movie stars, now it’s AI architects and cloud kings being toasted with champagne. It reflects not just the economic priorities of the U.K. and U.S., but also the growing weight tech leaders carry in Trump’s second administration.
Over the past year, Big Tech has increasingly woven itself into government agendas, whether it is OpenAI offering AI assistants for public services, Apple building digital health ecosystems, or Google and Microsoft promising cloud infrastructure. Trump, meanwhile, has kept tech front and center, from blasting Tim Cook over Apple’s supply chain to signing his controversial “anti-woke” AI order.
And these dinners are not one-offs. Since his second inauguration, Trump has made a point of surrounding himself with tech power brokerMark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Sam Altman, among them. In September, he even hosted a tech-only dinner with 33 Silicon Valley leaders. The notable absence? Elon Musk, once nicknamed “First Buddy” for his close ties to Trump, has been missing from recent gatherings. The question now is whether these glittering dinners and billion-dollar pledges will translate into real progress, or just more political theater in the age of AI.
