This year, TIME Magazine has named not just one Person of the Year, but eight – dubbed the “architects of artificial intelligence (AI)”
Those eight include:
1. Jensen Huang, Founder & CEO, NVIDIA
2. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO, Meta
3. Elon Musk, Founder, xAI
4. Sam Altman, CEO, OpenAI
5. Fei-Fei Li, “Godmother of AI”
6. Lisa Su, CEO, AMD
7. Dario Amodei, CEO, Anthropic
8. Sir Demis Hassabis, CEO & Co-Founder, DeepMind
TIME Editor-in-Chief Sam Jacobs said: “This was the year when artificial intelligence’s full potential roared into view, and when it became clear that there will be no turning back or opting out … This year, no one had a greater impact than the individuals who imagined, designed, and built AI.
“For these reasons, we recognise a force that has dominated the year’s headlines, for better or for worse. For delivering the age of thinking machines, for wowing and worrying humanity, for transforming the present and transcending the possible, the Architects of AI are TIME’s 2025 Person of the Year.”
NVIDIA is at the heart of AI and accelerated computing, having reached a market capitalisation exceeding $5 trillion – a historic milestone reflecting strong demand for its AI hardware and software platforms. Under Huang’s leadership, the company announced several major technology advancements and strategic partnerships across sectors such as automotive, telecommunications and design workflows.
Mark Zuckerberg has led Meta through a period of intensified investment and strategic repositioning focused on AI and next-generation computing, directing plans for the company to spend more than £60 billion on AI infrastructure and talent and establishing dedicated ‘Superintelligence Labs’ to advance large-language models and personal AI assistants.
Elon Musk has advanced the development and commercial footprint of his AI venture xAI by driving the release of its flagship AI model, Grok 3, which leverages significantly expanded computing resources and aims to compete with established AI platforms. During the year xAI also secured substantial funding and positioned itself for government contracts with the US Department of Defence worth up to $200 million, while releasing iterative improvements to its AI models and pursuing global expansion of infrastructure to support future growth.
In 2025, OpenAI announced the completion of its transition into a for-profit entity, a move that positioned it to raise substantial investment and potentially pursue a future stock market listing. Sam Altman, as CEO of OpenAI, guided the organisation through model updates that included the progression toward GPT-4.5 and the unified GPT-5 system. The company also closed a $40 billion funding round, breaking the record of the largest private tech funding round, which puts the company at a valuation of $300 billion.
Fei‑Fei Li, often referred to as the “Godmother of AI,” is a computer scientist and AI researcher renowned for her work in computer vision and cognitive neuroscience. She co‑founded AI4ALL, a non‑profit dedicated to increasing diversity and inclusion in AI and served as Chief Scientist of AI/ML at Google Cloud, where she guided AI product development and research. Her academic work at Stanford University included the creation of ImageNet, a large-scale visual database that significantly advanced deep learning and object recognition, and she has played a key role in shaping AI education, ethics, and policy discussions globally, advocating for human-centred and responsible AI.
In 2025 Lisa Su, CEO of AMD, oversaw strategic progress that advanced the company’s position in high‑performance and AI computing, including unveiling the Instinct MI350 Series GPUs and open, rack‑scale AI infrastructure at its ‘Advancing AI 2025’ event that delivered multi‑generation performance leaps and enhanced energy efficiency.
Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, has driven the company’s rapid growth in the competitive AI sector, securing a $13 billion Series F funding round at a reported $183 billion valuation and partnerships that provided access to a million Google Cloud TPUs and major investments from NVIDIA and Microsoft to expand compute capacity.
Sir Demis Hassabis, CEO and Co‑Founder of DeepMind, has advanced the lab’s AI research and strategic impact by championing scaled AI development toward artificial general intelligence, and emphasising AI’s potential to accelerate scientific discovery including drug design entering clinical trials this year. He also positioned DeepMind at the centre of public and government engagement, securing a partnership with the UK government to open an automated science laboratory focused on materials and clean energy research.
The 2025 TIME Person of the Year issue features two covers that visualise this technological revolution and include the key players driving it.
“In 2025, the leaders shaping, building, and driving transformation in AI wield unparalleled influence as this technology reshapes the world,” said TIME Chief Executive Officer Jessica Sibley.
The 29th December, 2025 Person of the Year issue of TIME will be available on newsstands beginning Friday, 19th December 19 and is available for purchase here.
