TIME published its 2026 TIME100 AI list last week snubbing Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who had appeared on every prior edition of the ranking. Instead of the CEO whose chips power the entire AI industry, TIME included Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Paris Hilton, and Ben Affleck.
Tom’s Hardware reports that Nividia’s Jensen Huang, who was named one of TIME’s eight “Architects of AI” and shared the magazine’s Person of the Year honor with Nvidia in 2025, does not appear anywhere on the new list. AMD CEO Lisa Su, the leader of Nvidia’s primary competitor, is missing as well. She was TIME’s 2024 CEO of the Year, made the 2024 AI list and the 2025 main TIME100, and was counted among December’s Architects of AI.
Nvidia isn’t shut out entirely. Its sole representative this year is Josh Parker, the company’s head of sustainability, who lands in the “Thinkers” category. Parker’s entry covers data center energy and water use, Nvidia’s tripling of Scope 3 emissions over two years, and the move to fully liquid cooled systems in the company’s Rubin platform. “Nvidia is at the center of the AI revolution,” Parker said in the profile.
Leaving off Huang is especially strange given that Nvidia’s latest quarter showed the company’s success is not slowing down. As Breitbart News previously reported:
Huang also pointed to improved visibility into Nvidia’s supply chain. “We’ve never forecasted like this before, we have a lot greater visibility now,” he said, contrasting today’s market with a year earlier. “This time last year, one lab alone was driving the build-out,” Huang said. “Today, we have a golden age of new AI labs and startups, multiple frontier labs scaling in parallel, a thriving open-model ecosystem and physical AI coming online, with strong momentum across the U.S. and around the world.”
Nvidia’s AI Clouds, industrial and enterprise segment, known as ACIE, brought in $40.3 billion in sales for the quarter, up 138 percent from a year earlier.
Nvidia’s executives weren’t the only high profile cuts. The accompanying article also lists Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis, Google’s Sundar Pichai and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella as absent this year.
Their replacements seem bizarre to those watching the AI industry: actor Ben Affleck, Sen. Bernie Sanders, and Paris Hilton all made the 2026 list. A wave of chip and infrastructure executives got in too, among them Broadcom CEO Hock Tan, Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra, SMIC co-CEO Liang Mong Song, Cerebras’ Andrew Feldman, CoreWeave’s Michael Intrator and Nscale’s Josh Payne.
Incredibly, TIME honors Huawei executive He Tingbo by including her on the list, choosing a leader from an adversarial Chinese company over the most powerful man in the AI chip arena.
This is the fourth year TIME has run the AI 100. Editor-in-chief Sam Jacobs, writing about how the honorees were picked, said the selection reflects “key storylines and who, in our opinion, are having the most influence in driving these developments.” Editor Ayesha Javed led the selection process.
The radical changes to the TIME list demonstrate that AI and its impacts on society are quickly entering the political sphere. Breitbart News social media director Wynton Hall has written his instant bestseller Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI to serve as the definitive guide on how the MAGA movement can create positions on AI that benefit humanity without handing control of our nation to the leftists of Silicon Valley or allowing the Chinese to take over the world.
Read more at Tom’s Hardware here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of AI, free speech, and online censorship.