Sam Altman, Tim Cook, and Other Tech Leaders Lauded Trump at a White House AI Dinner

Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, is collaborating with the White House as part of a $500 billion project to build more AI infrastructure. The endeavor dubbed Project Stargate is also jointly developed by SoftBank and Oracle.

“Thank you for being such a pro-business, pro-innovation president. It’s a very refreshing change,” Altman said to Trump over dinner. “I think it’s going to set us up for a long period of leading the world, and that wouldn’t be happening without your leadership.”

OpenAI also launched a special initiative for government adoption of AI. The US Department of Defense awarded OpenAI a $200 million contract to develop AI tools for military and national security applications.

Trump once threatened to jail Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. They have since formed an alliance. At the dinner, he was seated next to the president.

Zuckerberg ended a collaboration with third-party fact-checking organizations earlier this year, shortly after Trump signed an executive order banning federal officials from engaging in censorship.

During the dinner event, Zuckerberg thanked Trump for hosting and said that “all the companies here are building huge investments in the country in order to build their data centers and infrastructure to power the next wave of innovation.”

Earlier this year, Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, pledged to invest $600 billion in US manufacturing during Trump’s push for tariffs. In August, Cook presented Trump with a glass plaque mounted on a 24-karat gold base as a gift.

“I want to thank you for setting the tone such that we could make a major investment in the United States and have some key manufacturing, advanced manufacturing here,” Cook said during Thursday night’s dinner event. “I think that says a lot about your focus and your leadership and your focus on innovation.”

“I also want to thank you for helping companies around the world,” he added. “This is a very key, key thing, and I really enjoy working the administration on those topics as well, because I think they’re so important to the country. I want to thank the First Lady focusing on education.”

Google CEO Sundar Pichai recently announced that the company will commit $1 billion to education and job training in the US. During the task force meeting, Pichai also announced that $150 million of the billion-dollar fund will be dedicated toward AI-focused grants.

Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates was seated next to the first lady at the dinner.

Gates previously tried to convince the Trump administration to preserve critical global health programs and to reconsider cuts to USAID. The last time he sat down for dinner with Trump was shortly after the 2024 election at Mar-a-Lago.

Gates again pushed for both advancments and access to healthcare and how AI can advance curing diseases like sickle cell or HIV.

“But I think the thing that ties my first career that I still spend some time on, because AI is so phenomenal, and my second career is innovation, and innovating in health, in areas like vaccines or gene editing, and the president and I are talking about taking American innovation to the next level to cure and even eradicate some of these diseases,” Gates said.

“AI, for our foundation is that we want a doctor for everyone in Africa through AI, we want farmers to have incredible advice and kids to have a chance to learn,” Gates added. “So the work being done by the people at this table is changing the world.”

Despite potentially disagreeing over funding cuts, Gates thanked Trump for his “incredible leadership” over the White House dinner and said that people at that table are “changing the world.”

Alexandr Wang, the 28-year-old former CEO of Scale AI, was in attendance. Meta invested $14.3 billion in the AI startup for a 49% non-voting stake to bring Wang into the fold.

Wang joined Meta as its chief AI officer as part of the company’s AI spending spree and heads Meta Superintelligence Labs.

In January, Wang also wrote a letter to Trump outlining the need for the US to invest in AI.

Lisa Su, CEO of Advanced Micro Devices, has publicly endorsed the Trump administration’s AI Action Plan. The Trump administration also recently announced negotiations with AMD and Nvidia, which involve a proposed 15% levy on GPU exports to China.

Chamath Palihapitiya, the founder of Social Capital and part of the “All-In” podcast, was spotted outside of the White House ahead of the AI education event. Palihapitiya last toured key areas of the White House, such as the West Wing, in March.

David Sacks, a South African-American entrepreneur and investor in internet technology firms, was named the Chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology in December 2024. He is otherwise known as the White House AI and crypto czar.

Cameron Wilson is the president of Code.org, a prominent nonprofit dedicated to expanding access to K-12 computer science education in the US. As part of Google’s AI education funding commitment, Code.org will receive $3 million from the company.

Not only was Microsoft’s cofounder, Bill Gates, at the White House, but its current CEO was there too. In remarks, Satya Nadella thanked the president for bringing the group together and for “the policies that you have put in place for the United States to lead.”

“I think that everything that you’re doing in terms of setting in place the platform where the rest of the world can not only use our technology, but trust our technology more than any other alternative is perhaps the most important issue, and you, and you and your policies are really helping a lot,” Nadella added. “So thank you very much.”