A year and a half after ChatGPT burst onto the scene and made artificial intelligence the dinner table topic, the AI gold rush is in full swing. Over the past year, tech companies — both new and old — have seen their stock prices soar, making the world’s tech tycoons even richer and adding more than a dozen new AI billionaires to Forbes’ billionaires list.
The poster boy for all of this is Nvidia co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang. Nvidia’s stock price rose nearly 300% last year, putting Huang among the world’s 20 richest people for the first time (at No. 20). Several other companies have benefited from this wave. Shares of Super Micro Computer, which makes servers that handle compute-intensive AI applications, performed even better than Nvidia’s — rising more than 10-fold in the last year, more than any other company in the S&P 500 -, which made the co-founders, couple Charles Liang and Sara Liu, new billionaires. The CEO of semiconductor company Advanced Micro Devices, Lisa Su, also joined the billionaire ranks this year thanks to a 120% rise in AMD’s stock price. And Cloudflare, a cybersecurity company that relies heavily on AI, saw its shares rise 86%, making Chief Operating Officer Michelle Zatlyn a new billionaire and CEO Matthew Prince worth $3.4 billion -$, compared to $2 billion in 2023.Privately run AI companies have also taken off. Last year, AI-centric startups raised nearly $50 billion in investments, according to Crunchbase, amid a slow year for venture investing in general. OpenAI is the largest of them, worth over $80 billion after a reported $10 billion investment from Microsoft in January last year. Although CEO Altman has no shares in the company, Forbes estimates that he is a billionaire due to his network of venture investments. Two new billionaires from AI startups also join: Ivan Zhao, co-founder and CEO of Notion, based on his stake in the AI-focused productivity app worth around $5 billion (estimated valuation), and Brett Adcock, founder and CEO of AI robot company Figure, valued at $2.6 billion (valuation).A significant portion of funding for private companies comes from established tech giants like Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet, hoping to win the AI race that has emerged. At this point, it’s unclear if and when the AI bubble will burst and funding will dry up, but some cracks are already starting to appear: Inflection AI — co-founded by billionaire investor Reid Hoffman — gave up its chatbot in March, and the other two Co-founders as well as other researchers have turned to AI jobs at Microsoft.
Here are nine new billionaires whose companies are tied to AI:
CHARLES LIANG
Net worth: US$6.1 billion,
source of wealth: computer hardware,
country: USA
Liang founded the IT infrastructure company Super Micro Computer in 1993. Its server and storage systems are now in high demand among AI and cloud computing companies. Revenue reached a record $7 billion in fiscal 2023. The stock price rose more than 1,100% in the last 12 months, outperforming even its own chipmaker partners such as Nvidia, Intel and AMD. Liang’s wife, Sara Liu, is a senior vice president at Super Micro and also a new billionaire.
KWAK DONG SHIN
Net Worth: US$2.9 billion,
Source of Wealth: Semiconductors,
Country: South Korea
Shin runs Hanmi Semiconductor, which his father founded in 1980. Hanmi makes equipment used in packaging semiconductors — one of the final steps in chip production. Its most important customers include Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix. Business is booming thanks to the AI boom, with shares up more than 560% in the last year.
SHUNSAKU SAGAMI
Assets: US$1.9 billion,
Source of wealth: M&A brokerage,
Country: Japan
The 33-year-old Sagami’s M&A Research Institute mediates between sellers of small to medium-sized companies. It uses AI to find potential buyers for these companies, which are often owned by older people who are struggling with succession and want to exit. Sagami’s company listed in Tokyo in 2022.
IVAN ZHAO
Net worth: US$1.5 billion,
Source of wealth: Notion,
Country: USA
The co-founder and CEO of productivity startup Notion is a far cry from 2015, when he and fellow co-founder Simon Last laid off all of their employees, sublet their San Francisco office, and moved to Kyoto, Japan. Now profitable, Notion relies fully on AI and is valued at around US$5 billion in secondary market transactions, based on an estimated turnover of US$250 million
BRETT ADCOCK
Net Worth: $1.4 billion,
Source of Wealth: Robots,
Country: USA
Figure, which Adcock founded in 2022, is working to develop an AI-driven «general humanoid robot» and integrate the robots into the world of work. In February, the company raised $675 million from heavyweight investors including Jeff Bezos, Microsoft, Nvidia and OpenAI, at a valuation of $2.6 billion. Adcock, 37, owns an estimated 50% of the company.
LISA SU
Net Worth: US$1.3 billion,
Source of Wealth: Semiconductors,
Country: USA
Shares of Advanced Micro Devices have risen more than 60-fold since Su took the helm in 2014 and turned the struggling semiconductor company into an AI darling. The daughter of a mathematician and an accountant turned entrepreneur, Su was born in Taiwan and immigrated to New York City at age 3. She studied electrical engineering at MIT because it seemed to be the most difficult major.
MICHELLE ZATLYN
Net worth: $1.2 billion,
Source of wealth: Cybersecurity,
Country: Canada
Zatlyn’s Cloudflare uses AI to protect their customers and thwart cyberattacks. The San Francisco-based company also provides space in the cloud for developers to build their own AI models. A native of Canada, Zatlyn studied chemistry at McGill University in Montreal and worked at Google and Toshiba before founding Cloudflare in 2009 with her Harvard Business School classmate Matthew Prince, who is also a billionaire CEO. COO Zatlyn owns about 2% of the company’s shares, which have increased 65% since last year.
SAM ALTMAN
Net worth: $1 billion,
Source of wealth: Investments,
Country: USA
OpenAI’s CEO ushered in the AI explosion with the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, but does not own shares in the company, which is valued at over $80 billion. Instead, the 38-year-old, who was dramatically fired and rehired by OpenAI last November, owes his wealth to investments he made as president of startup incubator Y Combinator from 2014 to 2019, an early bet on Stripe and shares Reddit and the nuclear fusion startup Helion.
HARVEY JONES
Net worth: $1 billion,
Source of wealth: Nvidia,
Country: USA
A long-time technology investor and entrepreneur, Jones is a founding member of Nvidia’s board and owns 0.03% of the company’s shares, making him one of the biggest beneficiaries of the AI-fueled, 300% boom in Nvidia stock since last year.
