The 2025 AI Power List: Industry Leaders

The artificial intelligence sector has undergone a significant transformation since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022. Model capabilities have advanced, and enterprises are spending heavily to deploy AI across workforces. However, this rapid growth has brought challenges, including mental health concerns regarding generative AI interactions and the environmental strain of data centers.

In response, the focus has shifted from simply building powerful systems to ensuring public safety, trust, and sustainability. A 2025 list identifies 25 key players shaping this next wave of innovation. These individuals include executives like Sam Altman of OpenAI and Jensen Huang of Nvidia, who are driving technological advancements.

The list also highlights activists like Elliston Berry, who helped pass legislation to address deepfake harms, and researchers focusing on AI's carbon footprint. From infrastructure scaling to ethical data sourcing, these leaders represent the diverse frontiers of AI development.

Since OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November 2022, the AI sector has undergone a significant transformation. Model capabilities have advanced, agents are proliferating, and enterprises are spending big to roll out AI across their workforces. At the same time, generative AI-human interactions have started to fuel mental health concerns.

Investors continue to wait for their billion-dollar bets to yield returns, while companies contend with whether AI is actually boosting productivity. It is not just models creating friction: the data center boom that underpins AI deployment is straining electric grids and increasing utility bills, raising concerns about the tech's long-term sustainability.

Building the most powerful AI systems at the fastest rate possible is no longer enough to compete in today's AI arms race. Leaders must also consider public safety, trust, and environmental impacts. Since 2023, a recognized list has highlighted influential people in AI across sectors. For 2025, 25 key players have been identified who are shaping this next wave of AI innovation.

These individuals include executives designing AI infrastructure, investors betting on long-term value over hype cycles, researchers and activists confronting the social costs of AI, and founders building tools designed to help rather than harm. Together, they represent where AI will go next.

The physical backbone of the AI boom relies on data centers and specialized hardware. Jensen Huang, cofounder and CEO of Nvidia, largely built the chip empire powering the generative AI boom. In 2025, Nvidia reported $57 billion in Q3 revenue, a 62% year-over-year increase.

Under Huang's leadership, the company scaled production of its H200 and Blackwell Tensor Core GPUs. Nvidia's hardware and software now sit at the center of nearly every major foundation-model program. "We've entered the virtuous cycle of AI," Huang told investors in November, adding that compute demand across training and inference "keeps accelerating and compounding."

Meanwhile, Rachel Peterson, VP of Data Centers at Meta, is scaling Meta's AI infrastructure to build the most powerful large language models. Since the start of 2025, she has led the expansion of data center infrastructure, including new gigawatt-scale superclusters in Ohio and Louisiana. Her team now operates dozens of data centers across the US.

Peterson is tasked with overseeing the execution of Meta's $600 billion investment in AI infrastructure and jobs. "We want to be net-givers and not take from the community," Peterson told Business Insider. Similarly, Andy Power, CEO of Digital Realty, oversees a portfolio of more than 300 data centers across six continents. In 2025, Digital Realty partnered with Novo Nordisk and Nvidia to develop Gefion, a Denmark-based supercomputing platform.

Power stated that Digital Realty now supports nearly three gigawatts of data center capacity globally—enough to power up to 2.25 million US homes. Matthew Prince, cofounder and CEO of Cloudflare, also plays a critical role by defending the internet from unlicensed AI crawlers. In late 2024, Cloudflare began blocking major AI bots from scraping websites without creators' consent.

Prince's company reportedly serves about 80% of the top AI firms, helping them reduce fraud and operational costs. "We've essentially used AI to protect AI from other AIs," Prince said.

Driving the software side of the industry are founders and executives creating new tools and applications. Sam Altman, cofounder and CEO of OpenAI, continues to set the direction for consumer and enterprise AI. In 2025, OpenAI launched GPT-5, introduced the ChatGPT Atlas browser, and previewed new agentic models.

The company also released GPT-OSS, its first family of open-weight language models. OpenAI's ecosystem serves millions of developers and underpins a wide range of applications across coding assistants, productivity tools, and enterprise copilots. Mira Murati, CEO of Thinking Machines Lab, redefines what a frontier AI lab can look like outside Big Tech.

After departing OpenAI, Murati founded Thinking Machines Lab and assembled a team of roughly 30 researchers. The company raised $2 billion in seed funding and released Tinker, a tool designed to help researchers fine-tune large language models. Aravind Srinivas, cofounder and CEO of Perplexity, challenges Google's search dominance.

In September, Perplexity raised $200 million at a $20 billion valuation. The company rolled out Comet, an AI-powered web browser with agentic capabilities. "Curious people get more done, and we've built a set of AI tools and assistants that help users do more with AI," Srinivas told Business Insider.

Swami Sivasubramanian, VP at Amazon Web Services, is the architect behind AWS' AI products, including Bedrock and SageMaker. He now focuses on creating tools for developers to build autonomous AI systems. "Agentic AI is going to be one of the biggest shifts in technology in our generation," Sivasubramanian said.

As AI capabilities grow, so does the focus on safety and ethical implications. Elliston Berry, an activist, turned personal trauma into societal change after non-consensual nude images of her were circulated online. She and her mother helped pass the Take It Down Act, which President Donald Trump signed into law in May.

Megan Garcia, a safety advocate, shared her story to warn others about psychological dangers following her son's death. Her advocacy led Character.AI to bar users under age 18 from interacting with its AI companions. Milagros Miceli, founder of Data Workers' Inquiry, places AI's invisible workforce at the helm of the global conversation.

She empowers data labellers to document workplace conditions and mental health issues. Her efforts have influenced policy, leading to paid breaks and mental health support. Sasha Luccioni, AI and Climate Lead at Hugging Face, makes the carbon footprint of AI impossible to ignore.

She played a key role in launching the AI Energy Score project. "We're doing AI wrong, and it's hurting people and the planet," Luccioni told Business Insider. Angle Bush, founder of Black Women in Artificial Intelligence, is building a more inclusive AI future.

She partners with Big Tech companies to offer training and mentorship. "You can't have a revolution without Black women," Bush said. "We are not waiting."

The financial and academic engines powering AI are also represented on the list. Aydin Senkut, founder of Felicis Ventures, bet early on the infrastructure that powers AI. His portfolio includes more than 400 companies, with about 70% being AI startups. "AI permeates what we do at Felicis," Senkut said.

Alfred Lin of Sequoia Capital invests in AI startups at one of the world's most prestigious venture capital firms. Despite AI's colossal potential, Lin approaches investing with care, urging founders to prioritize durable products over experimental revenue. Christopher Manning, a professor and general partner at AIX Ventures, turns academic breakthroughs into AI businesses.

He left Stanford to focus on funding early-stage startups. "OpenAI is just never going to be far enough out into every business function to know how to do them all perfectly," Manning said. Ali Farhadi, CEO of the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2), makes AI research open and accessible.

He launched OlmoEarth, a family of open-sourced models for environmental modeling. Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, leads the research lab behind Google's most advanced AI systems. In 2025, DeepMind became central to Google's AI strategy through its work on Gemini.

Hassabis leads Isomorphic Labs, which raised $600 million in 2025. "The scaling of the current systems, we must push that to the maximum," Hassabis said.

AI is also reshaping specific industries like banking and healthcare. David Griffiths, CTO of Citi, embeds AI into the backbone of global banking. He oversaw the development of Stylus Workspaces, an internal AI tool supporting over 100,000 employees across 83 countries.

"The efficiency opportunity this gives us... is a massive unlock," Griffiths told Business Insider. Jacqui Canney, Chief People and AI Enablement Officer at ServiceNow, shapes the playbook for business reskilling. She launched ServiceNow University to upskill more than 3 million users in AI fundamentals by 2027.

"I believe we're at the beginning of a human capital renaissance," Canney said. In healthcare, Pierre Elias, Medical Director for Artificial Intelligence at NewYork-Presbyterian, moved AI from proof of concept to patient care. He led the team that created EchoNext, an AI-powered screening test for heart diseases.

In a study published in Nature, EchoNext correctly identified 77% of structural heart problems. "It's fundamentally changed the way we practice cardiology," Dr. Elias told Business Insider. Peggy Johnson, CEO of Agility Robotics, is turning the humanoid market from hype to commercial reality.

Under her leadership, Agility Robotics rolled out Digit through pilots in factories and warehouses. Digit has moved more than 100,000 warehouse bins since its commercial deployment.

Finally, the list highlights leaders focusing on how AI models are trained and their impact on creative industries. Naeem Talukdar, cofounder and CEO of Moonvalley, designs AI models grounded in ethics and safety. Moonvalley trains AI models on fully licensed datasets, collaborating directly with YouTubers and filmmakers.

In July, Moonvalley launched Marey, the first AI video generator trained entirely on fully licensed content. "There's a right way and a wrong way to build AGI, and we want to do it the right way," Talukdar said. Karen Hao, a journalist, has shifted the global discourse on AI through fearless reporting.

Published in May, her book "Empire of AI" offers an inside look at OpenAI's rapid ascent and the human and environmental consequences of its technology. Her investigative reporting has made waves among tech workers and policymakers.