AI is undoubtedly dominated by tech bros. But there’s a surprising trend emerging just below the surface: Women are running finance at some of the biggest hyperscalers on the planet.
In a Fortune feature, released alongside the 2026 Fortune Most Powerful Women list, I explored how the CFOs of AI companies are deciding how many billions to commit to data centers, chips, and compute capacity that may not pay off for years. And many of those CFOs are women. At the same time, we’re seeing the CFO role continue to evolve.
Colette Kress is CFO at Nvidia, a company valued at approximately $5 trillion that profits from the AI infrastructure boom by supplying the GPUs, networking, systems, and software stack that power those data centers. Finance chiefs at five of the giant hyperscalers—Meta’s Susan Li, Microsoft’s Amy Hood, Alphabet’s Anat Ashkenazi, Oracle’s Hilary Maxson, and OpenAI’s Sarah Friar—are collectively overseeing hundreds of billions in capital expenditures. For example, Microsoft expects to invest roughly $190 billion in capital expenditures in calendar year 2026, a 61% increase from the previous year.
“I don’t think of this as a story about ‘female CFOs,’” Friar told me. “I think it’s a story about a generation of leaders helping redefine the CFO role, and many of them happen to be women.” She continued, “The role today is far more than managing numbers. It’s about building companies through complexity and change—staying curious, adaptable, and kind.”
CFOs are shaping the investor stories that justify every dollar, while seeking AI value in the enterprise. A recent report from the Return on AI Institute suggests that organizations extract greater value from AI when CFOs play a central role in governing initiatives and evaluating business outcomes.
“AI is no longer a nice-to-have. AI is now a necessity for enhancing productivity across all industries and roles,” Kress said on Nvidia’s May 20 earnings call. “This is propelling revenue acceleration across all layers of the AI stack, including energy, chips, infrastructure, models, and applications.”
These CFOs are leading during “a period of enormous scale, complexity, and expectation,” Jenna Fisher, co-head of Russell Reynolds Associates’ Global Financial Officers Practice, told me. Read the full Fortune feature to see how these finance chiefs are navigating one of the most consequential capital cycles in tech history.
Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com
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