NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang was named to TIME’s annual list of the world’s 100 most influential people. Huang will be featured on the cover of TIME’s print publication — one of only seven on the list to receive a cover — which hits newsstands on Sept. 17th.
The 2021 TIME100 list includes political leaders like Joe Biden and Mario Draghi; creative figures like Scarlett Johansson and Steven Yuen; and sports icons like Simone Biles and Tom Brady. The only business tech figures on the list, besides Huang, are Tim Cook and Elon Musk.
The magazine cites Huang as “among the world’s most technically savvy CEOs,” and “a compassionate steward of his employees and a generous supporter of education in science and technology.”
Huang founded NVIDIA in 1993 and has served since its inception as president, chief executive officer and a member of the board of directors.
Artificial intelligence is transforming our world. The software that enables computers to do things that once required human perception and judgment depends largely on hardware made possible by Jensen Huang.
In 2003, amid great skepticism, Huang directed his company NVIDIA to adapt chips designed to paint graphics on computer screens, known as graphics processing units or GPUs, to perform other, more general-purpose computing tasks. The resulting advancements—and powerful chips—laid a foundation that could accommodate much bigger neural networks, the programs behind much of today’s AI. In the process, he has helped enable a revolution that allows phones to answer questions out loud, farms to spray weeds but not crops, doctors to predict the properties of new drugs—with more wonders to come.
Huang’s gamble paid off largely because he is among the world’s most technically savvy CEOs. He’s also a compassionate steward of his employees and a generous supporter of education in science and technology. With still emerging AI technologies creating an insatiable hunger for more computation, Huang’s team is well-positioned to keep driving technological advances for decades to come.
