Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang and AMD chief executive Lisa Su were missing from TIME’s 2026 AI power list.
According to Tom’s Hardware the omission is odd given Huang’s GPUs power the training kit behind frontier AI models. Nvidia has just reported one of the largest quarterly earnings hauls in US corporate history.
Huang was named one of eight TIME-designated “Architects of AI” in the magazine’s 2025 Person of the Year package. He had appeared in every previous TIME100 AI list, but Nvidia’s only representative this year was Nvidia head of sustainability Josh Parker.
Su was left out too, despite TIME naming her its 2024 chief executive of the year. The magazine put her on its 2024 AI list, the main TIME100 in 2025 and its December Architects of AI line-up.
Meanwhile, Ben Affleck, Senator Bernie Sanders and Paris Hilton all made the cut for their work around AI in film, regulation, deepfakes and worker protections. That still makes Huang and Su’s absence look daft, given that the AI boom is being built on the GPUs their companies sell.
Broadcom chief executive Hock Tan, Micron chief executive Sanjay Mehrotra, SMIC co-chief executive Liang Mong Song and Huawei HiSilicon president He Tingbo appeared on the 2026 list.
They were joined by Cerebras chief executive Andrew Feldman, CoreWeave chief executive Michael Intrator and Nscale chief executive Josh Payne. The roster includes Nvidia’s HBM supplier, two major GPU cloud customers, custom accelerator rivals and Chinese firms trying to replace Nvidia.
Parker’s profile appeared in the Thinkers category and focused on datacentre energy and water use. It pointed to Nvidia’s tripling of Scope 3 emissions in two years and Rubin’s move to 100 per cent liquid cooling.
“Nvidia is at the centre of the AI revolution,” Parker told TIME.
TIME editor-in-chief Sam Jacobs wrote that selection was led by TIME editor Ayesha Javed. Jacobs said the 100 honourees represented the year’s “key storylines and who, in our opinion, are having the most influence in driving these developments.”
Now in its fourth year, the TIME100 AI list appears keener on refreshing its club than on keeping obvious Silicon Valley names in place. Mark Zuckerberg, Demis Hassabis, Sundar Pichai and Satya Nadella were among the big names who survived the churn.
Nvidia’s second-quarter results, reported on 26 August, totalled $96.2 billion in revenue, including $89 billion from datacentres. That was up 117 per cent year on year.
The company became the first to cross a $5 trillion market cap in October 2025. Three weeks later, it posted a $57 billion record quarter.
