Few people outside of tech knew the name Jensen Huang as recently as Donald Trump’s first term. Today, he leads the only company more valuable than Apple; he’s the biggest celebrity in his native Taiwan; and at the White House gathering of the most prominent names in artificial intelligence last week, he was seated next to the president.
Huang, of course, is the CEO of Nvidia, and he is, without question, the most powerful person in AI—more even than Sam Altman and Dario Amodei, who lead OpenAI and Anthropic, respectively. The graphics processing chips Nvidia patiently pioneered in the 33 years since Huang co-founded it undergird the massive boom in data centers and AI. After Nvidia earned an astonishing $96 billion in revenue and $60 billion in profits during the most recent quarter, a Wall Street Journal reporter was moved to ask whether there would even be an AI revolution without Nvidia. Stephen Witt, Huang’s biographer, has called him “the emperor of AI.”
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