Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella is planning to attend a White House state dinner for Chinese President Xi Jinping this week, according to a person familiar with the planning, joining other top U.S. technology executives, Bloomberg News reports.
The dinner is scheduled for September 24th. Apple Executive Chairman Tim Cook is also set to attend, Bloomberg News reported earlier. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and Qualcomm Inc. CEO Cristiano Amon are also expected to be there.
The dinner itself is expected to be staged under a tent on the White House grounds. Trump has long argued that a permanent ballroom would spare the White House from putting up temporary structures for large state events, but the new ballroom is currently under construction and is not available for next week’s banquet. The White House ballroom is expected to be finished in summer 2028, with Trump putting the scheduled opening at around September 2028.
Cook left the chief executive role at Apple on September 1st and became executive chairman. He has aid he intends to stay involved in government relations, including dealings with the White House and China. Apple remains heavily dependent on China as both a manufacturing base and a major consumer market.
U.S. officials have separately said Amazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos, Tesla Inc. CEO Elon Musk, and Alphabet Inc. chief Sundar Pichai will be at the event. The person familiar with the planning asked not to be identified discussing private matters. Microsoft declined to comment.
The gathering would put some of the most prominent figures in artificial intelligence, chips, cloud computing, and consumer technology in the same room as President Donald Trump and Xi as Washington and Beijing discuss trade, technology, and AI.The meeting comes amid a sharper industry debate over how fast AI should advance. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently called for an industry-wide slowdown, citing risks such as large-scale cyberattacks. The Trump administration has argued that additional regulation or a U.S. pause would give China an advantage. China has criticized Amodei’s comments as fearmongering.
MacDailyNews Take: Again, nothing is getting paused. Humans don’t work like that.
There is no way to “slow down” the progress of AI. There will always be countries and companies pushing forward regardless of whatever unverifiable rules and regulations some countries attempt to impose. It’s simply human nature.
Any proposed “pause” runs contrary to human nature and, as in all endeavors that attempt to do so, will fail. – MacDailyNews, September 17, 2026
As we wrote in 2007, “Business models that fly in the face of human nature are doomed to failure.”
“Systems of government that fly in the face of human nature are doomed to failure, too.” — MacDailyNews, October 10, 2019
“Anything that flies in the face of human nature is unsustainable and will therefore fail at some point.” – MacDailyNews, March 29, 2023
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