Most of the CEOs leading the world’s most valuable semiconductor firms, the companies powering AI, cloud computing, and the digital economy, were born outside the United States. It’s a striking reminder that America’s technology leadership has been built not only on innovation, but on global talent.
Here are the top semiconductor firms (late 2024) by market capitalization, their CEOs, and birth countries: Nvidia (Jensen Huang, Taiwan); TSMC (C.C. Wei, Taiwan); Broadcom (Hock Tan, Malaysia); AMD (Lisa Su, Taiwan); Micron (Sanjay Mehrotra, India); Qualcomm (Cristiano Amon, Brazil); Intel (Lip-Bu Tan, Malaysia) — and more.
Their expertise has fueled America’s innovation engine. But global competition is shifting. Three questions now shape the future of U.S. technological leadership.
1. Why are so many top tech CEOs foreign-born?
These CEOs share a core characteristic: they are highly trained engineers and technologists who understand both the technology and have the skills to find and execute the business strategy to stay in the lead. In emerging industries, leaders with deep technology expertise, strong strategic judgment, and the ability to sell new ideas have a structural advantage. These are the skills that help CEOs navigate uncertainty and evaluate opportunities when entire industries are still forming or undergoing disruption. For decades, America’s universities and startup ecosystem attracted the world’s most skilled, and ambitious, technologists. And many of these technologists stayed to build these giants.
2. Will the U.S. keep attracting the world’s brightest?
The U.S. attracted the best students from Asia, Europe, and beyond for world-class engineering education and unparalleled career opportunities. But that advantage may be weakening. Visa uncertainty and rising competition from global technology ecosystems create new friction. The next Jensen Huang or Lisa Su may build their company in Beijing, Taipei, Bengaluru, Tel Aviv, or Seoul, not necessarily in California.
3. Can the U.S. compete against rising global incentives?
Countries that once sent their top technologists to the U.S. are now investing aggressively to keep them or bring them home:
Meanwhile, many of America’s own best students choose currently lucrative fields like finance, medicine, or law over engineering. If the inflow of foreign talent slows and domestic interest in high-tech remains limited, America’s position in future-defining industries could narrow.
The U.S. Needs an Entrepreneurship Strategy – Not Just a Talent Strategy
Global innovation is now a competition between national talent ecosystems. The U.S. cannot assume its position is guaranteed. To retain global technology leadership, America needs:
#1. More top students learning engineering and leading-edge technologies, and
#2. More founders and executives who know how to turn emerging technologies into world-leading companies. This second point is crucial – and the solution is not always venture capital.
Tactic #1: Encourage more top students to study leading-edge technologies
If the U.S. becomes less of a magnet for global engineering talent, the country will need to motivate more of its smartest students to study advanced technologies and pursue careers in emerging fields. Engineering talent fuels innovation. Without it, leadership erodes.
Tactic #2: Teach the skills that build unicorns – before VCs can be attracted
VC helps very few founders. As Marc Andreessen noted, VCs finance only about 15 unicorns per year, and usually after Aha, i.e., after entrepreneurs have already proven their potential (https://www.forbes.com/sites/dileeprao/2025/10/15/vc-entrepreneurs-vs-unicorn-entrepreneurs-8-key-differences/).
To build the next generation of global leaders, the U.S. needs to support the skills used by the 94% of billion-dollar entrepreneurs who bridged the gap from idea to Aha without VC.
Research on America’s 87 billion-dollar and 38 hundred-million-dollar entrepreneurs highlights six core unicorn-entrepreneurship skills (https://www.forbes.com/sites/dileeprao/2019/12/16/6-skills-to-unleash-your-inner-unicorn-entrepreneur/):
- Deep technology expertise.
- Strategic sales in emerging markets.
- Finance skills to grow more with less.
- Strategy skills to dominate emerging industries.
- Entrepreneurial financing skills to raise capital with control.
- Bootstrap launch skills to take off with minimal capital.
These skills helped founders build global giants in past waves of innovation. And they matter just as much for corporate executives who are navigating today’s emerging technologies to avoid being disrupted and to launch unicorns with less capital at risk.
If America wants more breakthrough companies, it needs more people trained in how to build them – using emerging technologies.
MY TAKE: Talent was America’s great edge. Skill development must be the next one.
America became the world’s innovation hub because it attracted global talent and built an ecosystem where technologists could build world-leading companies. The future of that edge depends on whether the U.S. can both continue attracting top global engineers and develop far more homegrown technology leaders.
The U.S. is investing billions in semiconductor fabs, but infrastructure alone is not enough. Chips don’t innovate themselves. People do.
To sustain its technological leadership, the U.S. must treat talent and unicorn-entrepreneurship skill development as national strategy – building the engineering depth and the unicorn-entrepreneurship capability needed to lead in emerging technologies.
Countries that invest in talent and skills will build the next generation of global champions. The U.S. can, too – but only if it acts now.
Once an innovation edge slips, it is extraordinarily hard to recover. Ask Europe.
