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Harvard Business Review ranks Nvidia's Huang as world's top CEO

Harvard Business Review ranks Nvidia's Huang as world's top CEO

The CEO of graphics card hardware giant Nvidia Jensen Huang has been ranked as the No.1 CEO on the planet by the Harvard Business Review (HBR).

The publication's Top 100 chief execs list pegs Huang as No.1 ahead of Microsoft's Satya Nadella - who came in ninth place - and the head of rival GPU firm AMD, Dr Lisa Su, who charted at No.26. Tencent boss Ma Huateng ranked 63th on the list, while the boss of French publishing giant Ubisoft Yves Guillemot came in at the No.74 spot and Activision Blizzard chief Robert Kotick ranked at No.81.

Huang came in the top spot owing to Nvidia's forward-thinking approach to machine learning and AI capability, HBR says, which has resulted in exponential growth for the company. HBR doesn't mention the fact that a large factor in the company's growth in the period mentioned - 2015-to-2018 - was the result of the now-ended cryptocurrency boom, which saw demand for GPUs soar to absurd heights.

"Data scientists were beginning to ask computers to perform much more sophisticated calculations more quickly, so Nvidia began spending billions of dollars on R&D to create chips that would support artificial intelligence applications," the publication wrote.

"By the mid-2010s its AI-focused chips had come to dominate this nascent market, showing up inside autonomous vehicles, robots, drone aircraft, and dozens of other high-tech tools. One look at Nvidia's stock chart shows how this bet has paid off: From late 2015 to late 2018, the company’s stock grew 14-fold - a performance that puts Huang, 56, in the top spot on HBR’s list of best-performing CEOs in the world this year."


PCGamesInsider Contributing Editor

Alex Calvin is a freelance journalist who writes about the business of games. He started out at UK trade paper MCV in 2013 and left as deputy editor over three years later. In June 2017, he joined Steel Media as the editor for new site PCGamesInsider.biz. In October 2019 he left this full-time position at the company but still contributes to the site on a daily basis. He has also written for GamesIndustry.biz, VGC, Games London, The Observer/Guardian and Esquire UK.