Jensen Huang and Lisa Su snubbed by TIME’s 2026 list of top 100 AI leaders — Paris Hilton and Ben Affleck, among others, make the list as ‘Architects of AI’ inexplicably not listed
TIME published its 2026 TIME100 AI list last week, with one notable omission: Jensen Huang, one of eight TIME-designated “Architects of AI,” whose GPUs power the training infrastructure for all frontier AI models and whose company has just reported one of the largest sets of quarterly earnings in American corporate history. AMD CEO Lisa Su is missing too, while Ben Affleck, Senator Bernie Sanders, and Paris Hilton all managed to clear a bar that the heads of the industry’s two dominant GPU makers apparently couldn’t. Aside from TIME’s Architect of AI and joint Person of the Year designation for 2025, Huang has featured on every previous edition of the TIME100 AI. This year, however, Nvidia’s sole entry is Josh Parker, the company’s head of sustainability.
Broadcom CEO Hock Tan, Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra, SMIC co-CEO Liang Mong Song, and Huawei HiSilicon president He Tingbo all appear on the 2026 list, joined by Cerebras’ Andrew Feldman, CoreWeave’s Michael Intrator, and Nscale’s Josh Payne. Together, the roster includes Nvidia’s HBM supplier, two of its biggest GPU cloud customers, its custom-accelerator rivals, and China, which is trying — and so far struggling — to replace Nvidia altogether.
Parker’s profile, which appears under the Thinkers category, focuses on data center energy and water consumption, alongside Nvidia’s tripling of Scope 3 emissions in two years, and the Rubin platform’s shift to 100% liquid cooling. “Nvidia is at the center of the AI revolution,” Parker told TIME.
TIME editor-in-chief Sam Jacobs wrote in the list’s accompanying article that selection was led by editor Ayesha Javed, and that the 100 honorees represent the year’s “key storylines and who, in our opinion, are having the most influence in driving these developments.” Now in its fourth year, this edition of the TIME100 AI appears to have focused especially on featuring the new additions to TIME’s community of AI leaders, with Mark Zuckerberg, Demis Hassabis, Sundar Pichai, and Satya Nadella representing four other honorees, arguably deserving of a space on this year’s list, churned out.
Su’s strong TIME back catalog makes her omission all the stranger still. The magazine named her its 2024 CEO of the Year, put her on the 2024 AI list and the main TIME100 in 2025, and included her among December’s Architects of AI.
Nvidia’s second-quarter results, reported August 26, totaled $96.2 billion in revenue, including $89 billion from data centers, up 117% year-over-year. The company became the first to cross a $5 trillion market cap last October, and posted a $57 billion record quarter three weeks later.
