The Announcement
President Donald Trump has officially appointed an initial group of 13 high-profile technology leaders to the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), the White House confirmed on Wednesday, March 25, 2026.
The inaugural list reads like a seating chart for the most exclusive dinner in tech history: Mark Zuckerberg, Jensen Huang, Larry Ellison, Sergey Brin, Lisa Su, Michael Dell, Marc Andreessen, and six additional figures spanning nuclear energy, quantum computing, fusion power, and cryptocurrency. The council will be co-chaired by David Sacks, the White House AI and Crypto Czar, and Michael Kratsios, Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy.
While PCAST can accommodate up to 24 members, Wednesday's announcement covers the first wave. Eleven seats remain open, with further appointments expected in the second quarter of 2026.
13
Initial PCAST appointments confirmed March 25, 2026
24
Maximum council size — 11 additional seats remain unfilled
2
Oracle executives on the inaugural council (Ellison + Catz)
$500B
Project Stargate AI infrastructure commitment (Oracle a lead investor)
The Co-Chairs: Sacks and Kratsios
The decision to place David Sacks at the helm of PCAST is a natural extension of his existing White House portfolio. Sacks, a PayPal Mafia veteran, early Facebook investor, and co-host of the All-In Podcast, was named AI and Crypto Czar in January 2026 — a role that gave him formal authority to coordinate federal AI policy across agencies. His elevation to PCAST co-chair places him as the primary liaison between the tech industry's most powerful figures and the executive branch.
Michael Kratsios, returning to government after serving as Chief Technology Officer of the United States under Trump's first term, brings institutional knowledge of both the OSTP apparatus and the specific challenge of translating Silicon Valley priorities into federal policy. His presence signals that Wednesday's council is intended to be operationally functional — not a ceremonial grouping.
The Oracle Factor
Of the 13 inaugural members, two come from Oracle: Larry Ellison (co-founder and CTO) and Safra Catz (Executive Vice Chair). No other company holds two seats on the inaugural council.
Oracle's double representation is not coincidental. The company is one of the lead investors in Project Stargate — the $500 billion AI infrastructure initiative announced earlier in 2026 alongside OpenAI and SoftBank. Oracle is building several of the large-scale data center campuses that form Stargate's physical backbone, and its cloud division is providing critical compute capacity for OpenAI's training workloads. Having both the company's founder and its second-in-command on PCAST ensures Oracle has a direct line into federal AI infrastructure policy as that project scales.
Why Silicon Valley Is in the Room
The Trump administration's relationship with Silicon Valley underwent a dramatic reversal between the first and second terms. In the first term, the relationship was primarily adversarial — defined by antitrust scrutiny, content moderation battles, and mutual suspicion. In the run-up to the 2024 election and through the first months of the second term, a new alignment has crystallized around three shared priorities: AI dominance over China, cryptocurrency deregulation, and the removal of federal barriers to infrastructure expansion.
The tech industry's willingness to engage — and in some cases, actively court — the Trump White House reflects a calculation that the alternative (progressive regulation, antitrust enforcement, and legislation like the Sanders-AOC AI Data Center Moratorium Act ) poses a more immediate threat to their business models than any regulatory risk from a Trump administration. The PCAST appointments formalize that alliance.
Zuckerberg's presence on the council is particularly notable. Meta is simultaneously managing a new wave of targeted layoffs as it redirects capital toward AI infrastructure — and facing dual child safety verdicts from juries in New Mexico and Los Angeles. A direct line to the White House advisory structure offers Meta a degree of regulatory insulation it cannot buy through lobbying alone.
The China and Chips Dimension
Beneath the headline names, the composition of the council reflects a specific strategic logic: every major bottleneck in the U.S.-China AI competition is represented at the table.
- Jensen Huang (NVIDIA) — controls the dominant AI accelerator hardware stack. NVIDIA's H100 and Blackwell chips are the primary target of existing export controls to China. Huang's participation gives the White House direct access to the executive most affected by those controls.
- Lisa Su (AMD) — NVIDIA's most credible competitor in the data center GPU market. AMD's MI300X series has emerged as an alternative for AI workloads, and Su's presence ensures the council is not entirely captured by a single chip vendor's perspective.
- Jacob DeWitte (Oklo) — nuclear microreactor startup. AI data centers require power at a scale that renewables alone cannot currently provide. Oklo's inclusion signals that the administration is factoring nuclear energy into the AI infrastructure equation — a significant policy signal for the power industry.
- Bob Mumgaard (Commonwealth Fusion Systems) — fusion energy. CFS holds the record for the world's strongest high-temperature superconducting magnet and is targeting a fusion pilot plant in the early 2030s. His inclusion positions fusion as a long-term energy source for AI compute.
- John Martinis — 2025 Nobel Laureate in Physics for quantum computing contributions. Quantum computing is the long-term successor architecture to classical AI accelerators, and China has made it a national strategic priority.
Opposition and Criticism
The appointments landed with predictable division in Washington. Republican lawmakers generally praised the appointments as a forward-looking investment in American competitiveness. Democrats were more varied: progressive members of the caucus sharply criticized what they described as a "tech billionaire capture" of federal AI policy, while moderate Democrats focused their concerns more narrowly on the absence of labor, civil rights, and consumer advocacy representation on the council.
Senator Bernie Sanders, who introduced the AI Data Center Moratorium Act the same day, called the appointments "a council of billionaires advising a billionaire on how to make other billionaires richer — at the expense of workers, ratepayers, and the climate."
Marc Andreessen's presence on the council also drew scrutiny from the investor community. Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) has invested heavily in AI startups, crypto infrastructure, and nuclear energy — all sectors now represented on a federal advisory body that Andreessen himself helps co-direct. Ethics watchdog groups have called for a formal conflict-of-interest disclosure framework before the council convenes.
- PCAST advises the President and the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) on matters relating to science, technology, and innovation policy.
- It has no formal rulemaking or regulatory authority — its influence is advisory and depends on the administration's willingness to act on its recommendations.
- In practice, PCAST reports and recommendations have historically shaped federal R&D budget priorities, export control frameworks, and legislative proposals sent to Congress.
- With David Sacks as co-chair — who holds direct executive authority over AI policy — this iteration of PCAST is positioned closer to the decision-making center than most previous versions.
- The council is expected to hold its first formal session in April 2026. Its initial work portfolio is expected to cover AI safety standards, data center permitting reform, and chip export control policy.