Time Magazine just published its list of the hundred most influential people in AI, and one name is conspicuously absent: Jensen Huang, the man whose company has done more than any other to power the AI boom.
Nvidia’s graphics processing units (GPUs) were originally built for video games starting in the early nineties. Two decades later, researchers in the then-burgeoning field of AI realized the chips were perfect for handling the massive computational workloads required to train and operate neural networks, the systems that would later form the backbone of ChatGPT, Claude, and other chatbots. Nvidia had accidentally created the fundamental building block of modern AI tools, transforming it into the most valuable company in history. In short: No Nvidia, no AI boom.
The company’s total revenue for the second fiscal quarter of this year was $96.2 billion, more than double what it had been during the same period last year. Its chips have become so crucial to global tech infrastructure that they’re a critical point of leverage in the AI race between the U.S. and China, with the federal government under both Biden and Trump restricting their export to China.
At this point, you’ve probably heard something about all the circular deals that underpin the buildout of AI infrastructure over the last couple of years. One constant presence in those deals is Nvidia. At this point, people have taken to calling Nvidia the “central bank of AI.”
Therefore, one might expect to see the company’s founder and chief executive mentioned alongside names like Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and Dario Amodei, all of whom were assigned prominent positions under the “Leaders” category on Time’s list. Yet Huang didn’t make the cut. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Demis Hassabis, the Nobel laureate founder and recently departed CEO of DeepMind, were also not mentioned. (Huang, Zuckerberg, and Hassabis were, however, all included in Time’s 2025 “Person of the Year” award, which was collectively given to what the magazine called “the architects of AI.”)
Actor and Director Ben Affleck was mentioned in the list, though. He founded a company called InterPositive in 2022, which helps filmmakers build AI-powered post-production tools trained on their own content. It was acquired by Netflix earlier this year for a reported $587 million. Paris Hilton was also included for her advocacy work against nonconsensual sexual deepfakes.
This year’s list was curated by TIME senior editor Ayesha Javed, “who spent months working with TIME journalists and contributors to find the group of 100 individuals who best represent the year’s key storylines and who, in our opinion, are having the most influence in driving these developments,” according to a statement published Thursday by the outlet’s editor-in-chief, Sam Jacobs.
Of course, lists of this kind are not an unvarnished representation of the true state of affairs within AI. Like any award, it reveals as much about the institution handing it out as it does about the recipient. It’s understandable that a publication like Time would focus on pop culture icons to the exclusion of the leaders behind the “picks and shovels” companies like Nvidia, AMD, and TSMC. But make no mistake, they—not the A-list celebrities—are the real power brokers in AI.
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