Jensen Huang

Nobody is hotter in Silicon Valley right now than Jen-Hsun “Jensen” Huang, 54, the cofounder and CEO of semiconductor and software company Nvidia. The chipmaker’s GPUs, or “graphics processing units,” crunch the complex calculations necessary for cryptocurrency markets, so-called deep neural networks, and the visual fireworks you see on the big screen. Nvidia currently owns 70% of the market for GPUs thanks to Huang, a visionary who foresaw a blossoming market for a new kind of computing early enough to reposition his company years in advance. That vision and his company’s incredible financial performance—Nvidia has been growing profits at better than 50% annually and its stock has leapt from $30 to above $200 in two years—make Huang the clear choice as Fortune’s Businessperson of the Year for 2017. For the full cover story on Huang, go here. —Andrew Nusca