Sheryl Estrada
5 min read
In This Article:
Good morning. Fortune has released its Most Powerful Women (MPW) list for 2025, featuring 100 businesswomen from companies around the world.
The list, compiled by Fortune editors, is based on company size and health, as well as each executive’s career trajectory, influence, innovation, and efforts to make business better. No. 1 is General Motors CEO Mary Barra, who is among several Fortune 500 and Fortune Global 500 CEOs represented.
As strategic partners to the CEO, the role of CFOs has also evolved far beyond traditional financial stewardship and reporting. Finance chiefs are now expected to be operational leaders, business partners, and key drivers of growth and innovation.
Meng Wanzhou, daughter of company founder Ren Zhengfei, is Huawei’s CFO. Meng’s terms as chair have coincided with the release of Huawei’s new iPhone-beating smartphones. Huawei is now part of China’s chip plans as Washington tries to limit China’s access to foreign-made semiconductors. Nvidia now considers Huawei a “strategic competitor.” The company reported $118 billion in revenue for 2024, close to its 2020 record.
—Susan Li, CFO of Meta Platforms, No. 41
At age 39, Susan Li is among the youngest finance chiefs in the Fortune 500, but she spent nearly two decades at Meta, helping guide the company to a market cap exceeding $1 trillion. Li joined Meta (then Facebook) in 2008 and became CFO in 2022 after serving as vice president of finance. Li will oversee the company’s full-year 2025 capital expenditures, projected to be in the range of $64 billion to $72 billion, with a significant portion directed toward infrastructure hardware and data-center investments to support its AI efforts.
—Colette Kress, CFO of Nvidia, No. 44
Colette Kress has led Nvidia through unprecedented demand for products like Blackwell GPUs, which power AI-related computing tasks. She joined Nvidia as CFO in 2013 after senior finance roles at Cisco and Microsoft. During Kress’s tenure, Nvidia has become one of the world’s most valuable companies, with its market cap reaching a high of almost $3.5 trillion and currently hovering near $3 trillion. For fiscal 2025, Nvidia posted record results, with revenue reaching $130.5 billion—more than the $60.9 billion earned the previous year.
—Anat Ashkenazi, SVP and CFO of Alphabet and Google, No. 51
Anat Ashkenazi became CFO of Alphabet and Google in July 2024. One of her strategic priorities as finance chief of the $2 trillion company is to integrate AI within its processes to boost efficiency and productivity, with cost reductions helping to fund AI innovation. Ashkenazi will oversee Alphabet’s investment of approximately $75 billion in capital expenditures in 2025. She previously had a 23-year career at Eli Lilly and Company, culminating in her appointment as CFO in 2021. Ashkenazi supported the development of groundbreaking weight loss drugs Zepbound and Mounjaro.
