King Charles meets with six major tech CEOs including Jensen Huang, Jeff Bezos, and Tim Cook to discuss startup funding in the UK

AIMPACT News, April 29 (UTC+8). According to Beating monitoring, during King Charles III of the United Kingdom’s state visit to the United States, he met with six leaders in the U.S. technology industry at Washington’s Blair House: NVIDIA CEO Huang Renxun, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Apple CEO Tim Cook, AMD CEO Lisa Su, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, and Alphabet President Ruth Porat. The discussion centered on the funding challenges faced by UK university spin-off startups.

Charles said that these entrepreneurs “are always the hardest to get started; they fall into the terrible Valley of Death.” Huang Renxun replied that there are huge opportunities in AI and quantum robotics, and that the UK needs a more active venture capital industry and entrepreneurial culture. Charles added, “You are all deadly competitors,” and Huang Renxun responded, “No one needs to die.” Charles then pressed, “Really?” prompting laughter from everyone present.

Bezos shared a story about founding Amazon in 1995, when he could only raise $50,000 each time and was rejected by 40 investors. Charles said, “Those 40 people are all regretting it now,” and he likened the investors who missed out on Amazon to the publishers that had refused to publish Harry Potter at the time.

During Trump’s visit to the UK last September, companies including Microsoft, NVIDIA, Google, and OpenAI pledged to invest 31 billion pounds (about $42 billion) in the UK over the next few years, covering AI, quantum computing, and civilian nuclear energy. That evening, the aforementioned tech leaders all attended the state banquet at the White House hosted for Charles. (Source: BlockBeats)