TIME100 AI 2026: Jensen Huang, Lisa Su and Zuckerberg All Snubbed as China’s AI Roster Surges
TIME magazine unveiled its fourth annual TIME100 AI list on August 27, and the snubs stunned the tech world: NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang — the “Godfather of AI” — was left off entirely, along with AMD’s Lisa Su, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis. Sam Altman, Elon Musk, the Amodei siblings and Jeff Bezos made the cut, joined by atypical names like a socialite, union leaders, a Hollywood actor and a U.S. senator. The biggest structural shift is China’s surging roster: SMIC’s Liang Mong-song, Huawei’s He Tingbo, Alibaba’s Eddie Wu, Moonshot AI’s Yang Zhilin, Zhipu’s Zhang Peng and AgiBot’s Deng Taihua all landed on the list — spanning chips, cloud, foundation models and robotics, and signaling that AI power is shifting from compute arms dealers to application builders and geopolitical breakouts.





