The AI gold rush just hit $400 billion, and guess who's holding the map?

Lisa Su isn't just running a chip company—she's controlling the choke points that every AI lab depends on. When semiconductor supply tightens, she decides who builds the next breakthrough model and who waits in line.

Then there are the CFOs quietly managing $8 trillion in combined market cap. These aren't ceremonial roles. They're allocating capital that shapes whether neural networks run on centralized clouds or decentralized infrastructure. Their spreadsheets determine which protocols get funding and which visions stay theoretical.

But here's the catch: executive suites are opening up, yet board rooms? Still gatekept. The C-suite might be diversifying, but the rooms where decade-long strategies get drawn remain selectively accessible.

The shift is real, but incomplete. Influence is spreading, though not evenly. And in an industry where infrastructure decisions ripple through every layer—from cloud providers down to blockchain validators—who sits at the table isn't just about representation. It's about whose priorities get encoded into the systems we'll all run on.