AMD CEO Lisa Su joins tech billionaires at Trump’s White House AI dinner, signaling chip priorities ahead
The gathering of roughly two dozen tech leaders focused squarely on AI infrastructure, with crypto notably absent from the conversation.
AMD CEO Lisa Su sat down with roughly two dozen of the most powerful figures in technology at the White House on September 4, joining a dinner hosted by President Trump that was originally planned for the Rose Garden but moved to the State Dining Room because of bad weather. The guest list read like a Fortune 500 fantasy draft: Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, Bill Gates, Sam Altman, and Sundar Pichai all made the cut.
The event brought together approximately two dozen tech and business leaders, including 13 billionaires, for a strategic conversation about keeping America at the front of the global AI race. Leaders reportedly pledged substantial investments in AI infrastructure and data centers, aligning themselves with the Trump administration’s push to accelerate domestic innovation.
Su, who has turned AMD into one of the most consequential chipmakers on the planet, was among the most prominent attendees. In a follow-up interview on September 11, she voiced strong support for the administration’s AI action plan, emphasizing the need for proactive measures to maintain American leadership in AI while competing with China.
She also flagged national security concerns tied to semiconductor supply chains, a theme that has become central to US technology policy over the past several years.
AMD has an interesting history with the crypto world. The company’s GPUs were once the workhorses of cryptocurrency mining operations, and AMD even had partnerships with firms like Bitmain during the mining boom years. Su’s pivot toward AI and mainstream computing priorities has been underway for years, but her prominent role at this White House dinner, and her enthusiastic endorsement of the administration’s AI strategy, makes the repositioning unmistakable.
The dinner also reinforces a broader pattern in Washington: crypto’s relationship with the current administration remains complicated and compartmentalized, while AI enjoys a much warmer reception from both sides of the aisle. Tech leaders who once touted blockchain’s transformative potential are now channeling that same energy toward artificial intelligence, and they’re getting White House dinners for the effort.