Jensen Huang
Co-founder and chief executive of Nvidia, the company whose chips most of the AI industry runs on.
Jensen Huang co-founded Nvidia in 1993 and has run it ever since, which makes him the longest serving chief executive in the chip business and, since the AI boom, one of the most consequential people in the industry. Nvidia’s graphics processors and its CUDA software are what almost every large model is trained and served on, so his decisions about supply, pricing and financing shape what everyone else can afford to build.
He is also the industry’s most visible defender of its own economics. When critics argue that AI chips go obsolete far faster than the accounting admits, Huang answers with rental prices and long hardware lifespans, pointing out that the A100 from 2020 is still earning money. In August 2026 he backed that argument with money, guaranteeing part of the residual value of Nvidia hardware in a 500 billion dollar financing programme.