The Most Powerful People in A.I

July 15, 2026

Power in artificial intelligence has stopped moving through the channels everyone was trained to watch. There was a time (not long ago, though it already feels quaint) when you could rank the field by compute and capital raised, and the ranking would roughly match reality. That scoreboard no longer explains who wins.

There are other A.I. Power Lists, but ours asks one question and holds to it: Who, over the last twelve months, has controlled the flow of capital in artificial intelligence? The money, where it moves, who moves it and who is waiting.

The honorees below make decisions that everyone (downstream and up) follows, but the mechanisms of power in A.I. shift faster than in any other sector that history has ever chronicled, so whether their leverage compounds is a question we look forward to asking next year.

The Most Powerful People in A.I.

Elon Musk

Sundar Pichai

Dario Amodei

Mark Zuckerberg

Sam Altman

Jensen Huang

Prince Mohammed bin Salman

Stephen A. Schwarzman

Satya Nadella

Liang Wenfeng

Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan

Patrick Collison

Masayoshi Son

Vinod Khosla

Lisa Su

Marc Andreessen

Andy Jassy

Krishna Rao

Andrew Feldman

Cristiano Amon

Larry Ellison

Ali Ghodsi

Sarah Friar

Tareq Amin

Jonathan Ross

Alexandr Wang

Brad Gerstner

Robert F. Smith

Shawn Edwards

Brett Adcock

Hemant Taneja

Andrej Karpathy

Thomas Kurian

Matthew Prince

Marco Argenti

John Jumper

Harry Sideris

John Furner

Peter Thiel

Larry Fink

Amy Hood

Chris Cox

William J. Fehrman

Michael Dell

Bernard Gavgani

Eric Glyman & Karim Atiyeh

Robert M. (Bob) Blue

Tekedra Mawakana

Mustafa Suleyman

Michael Truell

Scott Wu

Robin Vince

Kevin Ooley

Misha Laskin & Ioannis Antonoglou

Mira Murati

Reid Hoffman

Shishir Mehrotra

Ivan Zhang, Aidan Gomez & Nick Frosst

Daphne Koller

Ogi Redzic

Raquel Urtasun

Brian Armstrong

Yann LeCun

Demis Hassabis

Walid Mehanna

Ilya Sutskever

Arvind Krishna

Vikram Bajaj

Jim Burke

Bret Taylor & Clay Bavor

Aravind Srinivas

Will Marshall

Ravi Kumar

Tobias Lütke

Jaakko Kokko

Matt Anderson

Rene Haas

Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond & Thom Wolf

Michael Kratsios

Cristóbal Valenzuela

Eric Schmidt

Ravi Mhatre

Tuhin Srivastava

Fei-Fei Li

Lin Qiao

Palmer Luckey

Joe Lonsdale

Guillaume Lample, Timothée Lacroix & Arthur Mensch

Piotr Dąbkowski & Mati Staniszewski

Parminder Bhatia

Laurel Taylor

Minna Song & Stoyan (Tony) Stoyanov

Malte Kosub

Elon Musk

Founder of xAI; CEO of Tesla & SpaceX

Elon Musk became the A.I. industry’s largest disruptor and financier this year after rolling his LLM, social media and space businesses into a $1.75 trillion juggernaut debuting on Nasdaq. In February, Musk’s SpaceX acquired xAI, which had absorbed the social media platform X the previous year, in a deal that valued SpaceX at about $1 trillion and xAI at $250 billion. The series of deals fused rocket and satellite production, internet services, A.I. research, data centers and social media into one vertically integrated tech giant. It also formalized Musk’s lifelong ambition to build an all-encompassing business empire under the “X” brand.

Musk’s long-term goal is to move the energy-intensive process of running A.I. systems off-planet. In SpaceX’s IPO filings, he pitched the idea of space-based data centers using satellites and solar power, which would be vastly cheaper than land-based infrastructure. SpaceX has filed for permission to put as many as one million satellites in Earth’s orbit. Musk estimates the technology could be cost-competitive in two to three years.

In March, Musk unveiled Terafab, a massive semiconductor initiative designed to give Tesla, SpaceX and xAI direct control over the chips powering their A.I. systems. The project's ultimate goal is to generate one terawatt of annual compute capacity. The initial phase is estimated to cost $55 billion, with total investments projected to reach $119 billion. Musk’s team has already begun reaching out to supply partners with the goal of beginning silicon production by 2029.

Terafab plans to use Intel’s next-generation 14A process for eventual mass production in Grimes County, Texas. In April, Tesla broke ground on an initial $3 billion R&D pilot facility at Tesla’s Giga Texas in Austin. This research fab will test and prototype chips for Tesla's cars and Optimus robots at a limited scale.

Elon Musk. Getty Images

Sundar Pichai

CEO of Google & Alphabet Inc.

Sundar Pichai spent the past year proving that Google can keep pace in A.I. without compromising the business it already has. Alphabet’s share price doubled over the past 12 months, while most of its Big Tech peers moved far less, and the company has backed that confidence with heavy spending. After investing about $91 billion in 2025, it lifted its projected 2026 capital expenditure to between $180 billion and $190 billion.

Alphabet has already crossed the $100 billion quarterly revenue mark, and Google Cloud has continued to post strong growth. Gemini has also reached a wide audience, surpassing more than 900 million monthly active users, and “AI Mode” in Search has passed 1 billion monthly users, Pichai said at Google I/O in May.

Pichai has argued that A.I. is becoming central to how Google works and how people search, write and code. At Cloud Next in April, he highlighted Google’s internal use of A.I., saying 75 percent of new code at the company is now A.I.-generated and then reviewed by engineers, up from 50 percent the previous fall. He also unveiled Google’s eighth-generation Tensor Processing Units, built for heavy training workloads.

That same month, Google introduced Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, aimed at helping companies manage fleets of A.I. agents rather than just experiment with them. Pichai’s broader message is that Google wants to control the full stack, from A.I. chips to Search and Android, while keeping users inside its own ecosystem. That makes this a much bigger bet than a simple Gemini-versus-ChatGPT contest.

Sundar Pichai. Getty Images

Dario Amodei

Co-Founder & CEO, Anthropic

Anthropic, currently the world's most valuable private A.I. startup valued at $965 billion, is poised for a trillion-dollar public market debut. It's a remarkable ascent for a company that was seen as a cautious alternative to OpenAI just a few years ago. In May, Amodei said Anthropic had posted an 80-fold annual increase in revenue and usage in the first quarter of 2026, pushing projected annualized revenue past $47 billion.

That growth has come alongside sharper political and regulatory scrutiny. After Anthropic temporarily suspended access to Claude Fable 5 in June, Amodei argued in an essay that governments should be able to block or delay deployment of models judged, on the basis of third-party assessment, to pose unacceptable risks. He followed that by announcing $200 million for research into public policy on A.I. and another $150 million for a national fellowship aimed at spreading the benefits of A.I. more broadly across the U.S.

Meanwhile, the company’s appetite for compute continues to grow. In April, Amodei secured 5 gigawatts of next-generation compute capacity with Google and Broadcom, beginning in 2027, to support future frontier models. Anthropic has also committed more than $100 billion over ten years to Amazon cloud infrastructure in exchange for up to 5 gigawatts of additional capacity, while Amazon has said it will invest as much as $25 billion in the company.

In addition, Anthropic has announced a $50 billion data center buildout in Texas and New York. It has also pledged $30 billion toward Microsoft Azure compute and agreed to buy up to 1 gigawatt of Nvidia hardware.

Dario Amodei. Courtesy of Anthropic

Mark Zuckerberg

Founder, Chairman & CEO of Meta

Mark Zuckerberg overhauled Meta’s A.I. team last year after deciding that simply playing catch-up was no longer enough. In June 2025, Zuckerberg launched Meta Superintelligence Labs to pursue advanced machine intelligence and tapped Alexandr Wang, the Scale AI co-founder and former chief executive, to lead the effort after Meta took a $14.3 billion 49 percent stake in his company. Since then, MSL has absorbed Meta’s FAIR (Fundamental AI Research) team in an effort to unify frontier-model development with product deployment. Zuckerberg has said he would rather risk “misspending a couple of hundred billion” than fall behind in A.I. That urgency has carried into 2026, with Meta raising its capital spending forecast to as much as $145 billion, after spending $72.2 billion in 2025. This week, the company announced plans to begin producing its custom Iris A.I. chip in September in an effort to double computing capacity.

For now, Meta’s ad business is still strong enough to bankroll the ambition. The company generated $201 billion in revenue last year and is on pace to reach roughly $250 billion this year, according to Wall Street estimates. In the first quarter of 2026, Meta generated $56.3 billion in revenue—a 33 percent year-over-year increase—and $26.8 billion in net income.

Over the past year, Meta’s major A.I. releases have included April’s Muse Spark, the first major model out of MSL, the new Meta Glasses in June and Muse Image in July. Zuckerberg has cast the effort as a bid to build “personal superintelligence,” and he has said Meta will keep shipping products throughout the year rather than wait for a single breakthrough. With apps that already reach billions of users, Meta has a distribution advantage that rivals still have to buy.

He has also been candid about the growing pains. In May, Meta notified roughly 8,000 employees of layoffs and reassigned about 7,000 others to A.I.-focused roles as part of a broader reorganization. Zuckerberg has acknowledged how hard the transition has been, telling employees in July that A.I. agent development had not accelerated as quickly as expected. In July, Meta also expanded its Hyperion data center in Louisiana to five gigawatts of planned computing capacity, increasing the project’s expected investment to more than $50 billion.

Mark Zuckerberg. Courtesy of Meta

Sam Altman

Founder & CEO of OpenAI

On February 27, Sam Altman closed a $110 billion funding round for OpenAI at a $730 million pre-money valuation. On March 31, OpenAI closed the expanded round with $122 billion in committed capital at an $852 billion post-money valuation, in what was likely the largest private technology financing to date. The funding included  $50 billion from Amazon, $30 billion from Nvidia, and $30 billion from SoftBank, with Microsoft and additional financial investors contributing to the expanded round. The financing reshaped OpenAI’s partnerships. Amazon Web Services became the exclusive third-party cloud provider for the company’s enterprise platform, Frontier. This prompted Microsoft and OpenAI to renegotiate their longstanding partnership. In April, the two companies amended their agreement, easing exclusivity terms to allow OpenAI to operate across multiple clouds while keeping Azure as the primary platform. Meanwhile, OpenAI’s chatbot, ChatGPT, surpassed 900 million weekly users and 50 million paying subscribers as of February of this year.

Growth came at a price. OpenAI burned $3.7 billion in Q1 2026 alone against $5.7 billion in revenue. At the company's "Intelligence at Work" event on June 2, Altman acknowledged that enterprise customers have become increasingly weary of costs after spending much of the year chasing model capability.

Days after the Capitol Hill appearance came a rupture with OpenAI's most important distribution partner. On July 10, Apple sued OpenAI in federal court in Northern California, alleging trade secret misappropriation and breach of contract in the development of OpenAI's unreleased consumer hardware. The complaint names hardware chief Tang Tan, a former Apple vice president, and engineer Chang Liu as defend

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