Jensen Huang

Nvidia has sold the fastest graphics processing chips for playing video games for most of its 27-year history. But the reason Nvidia overtook Intel in 2020 as the most valuable U.S. chipmaker started with CEO and cofounder Jensen Huang’s realization that those same kinds of chips would also be well-suited for machine learning, artificial intelligence, and big data analysis—not to mention mining cryptocurrency too. Nvidia’s stock price has gained 122% this year, giving Huang the currency to make a big acquisition. For $40 billion, he’s betting on chip-design powerhouse ARM to help Nvidia get even deeper into cloud computing and smart devices.