Yahoo Finance Awards OpenAI Company of the Year

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Yahoo Finance awarded OpenAI its 2025 Company of the Year on Monday, selecting the AI model company over Nvidia, the semiconductor giant that has dominated headlines and stock prices throughout the year. 

The story is no longer about who makes the best chips. The story is now about who makes the best models.

For most of 2025, Nvidia occupied the center of the AI investment narrative. The company's GPUs are the infrastructure layer that everyone building AI models needs to use. Demand for Nvidia chips seemed insatiable. But by the end of the year, the narrative had splintered. Nvidia is still dominant in hardware, but model companies have begun competing with each other rather than just all competing for Nvidia's chips.

OpenAI's selection reflects its position in that competition. The company released GPT-5.1 and then announced GPT-5.2 in rapid succession, maintaining its lead on frontier model performance. It acquired Rockset to improve its data infrastructure. It launched Atlas, an AI browser that integrates its model directly into user workflows. These moves position OpenAI not just as a model company but as an application company, putting it in direct competition with Google and Microsoft on multiple fronts.