Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was named as the Financial Times’ 2025 Person of the Year, continuing the trend of naming artificial intelligence (AI) executives as the year’s most influential people.
The FT said it gave Huang the title because of the role he has played in “the AI mania that is sweeping through the business and financial worlds.”
This year, Huang led California-based computer chipmaker Nvidia on an unstoppable ascent to become the most valuable public company in the world, and the first to break through the $4 trillion (€3.4 trillion) barrier.
Its ultra-powerful AI computer chips are the hottest commodity in the race for global AI dominance, underpinning one of the biggest-ever pushes to build new tech infrastructure across the globe.
The FT’s announcement comes the day after TIME magazine namedthe “Architects of AI” as their Person of the Year, including executives from major AI companies, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, xAI CEO Elon Musk, and Huang.
Who is Jensen Huang?
Born in Taiwan, Huang moved to the United States with his family as a boy and eventually settled in California after attending Stanford University.
At 30, he was working as an electrical engineer in the San Francisco Bay Area when he co-founded Nvidia with two friends. Their goal was to develop a graphics processing unit (GPU) that would revolutionise computer graphics for video games.
Huang weathered many storms with Nvidia, holding the course and making some smart, if risky bets early on.
He believed that traditional chip designs would eventually fail to keep up with the growing demands of microprocessors and that Nvidia’s gaming chips would give them an edge in this new era.
The gamble paid off, as Nvidia’s chips are now the leading hardware used to train powerful AI systems, like the technology behind ChatGPT and image generators. Companies including Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI use Nvidia’s computer chips in their AI models.
Huang called Nvidia “one of the most consequential technology companies in history.”
“The computer technique that took us 30 years to invent is now fundamentally changing all of computing,” he added.
