Turning Engineers into Billionaires: Artificial Intelligence Sparks a New Era of Wealth

A host of tech industry figures have become billionaires or increased their fortunes at unprecedented rates, thanks to the global AI race.

According to statistics from the Economic Times, in just a few years, the market capitalization and personal assets of AI technology leaders have skyrocketed. Jensen Huang, co-founder and CEO of Nvidia, is currently the most prominent with a fortune exceeding 100 billion USD.

Thanks to the booming demand for AI chips, Nvidia's stock has become the center of attention on Wall Street, transforming Huang from an immigrant engineer into one of the richest people on the planet with a net worth of about $157 billion, according to Bloomberg .

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has also entered the billionaire ranks thanks to his investments and shares in the AI field. He does not own shares directly in OpenAI but has a personal fortune of about $ 2 billion thanks to previous investments in Stack, Reddit, Loopt. Although his assets cannot be compared to Huang, Altman is considered a powerful figure, leading the development of ChatGPT - a tool that changed the technology world overnight.

The list also includes names like Larry Page and Sergey Brin (Google), Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), and Satya Nadella (Microsoft). The tens of billions of dollars invested by these corporations in AI have driven up stock prices, pushing the asset values of founders, CEOs, and major shareholders skyrocketing.

One notable point is that the speed of “creating billionaires” with AI is much faster than the previous Internet or smartphone era. In just 18 months, the AI market has added tens of billions of dollars to the assets of the technology industry. Many experts say this could be “the biggest wave of wealth creation in recent history.”

For example, Alexandr Wang, founder of Scale AI, became the youngest self-made billionaire at age 26. His company specializes in data labeling and serves more than 300 customers, including Google, Meta, and GM. With a 14% stake in Scale worth $14 billion, Wang is now worth about $2.7 billion.

Liang Wenfeng, CEO of DeepSeek, was formerly a hedge fund manager. In 2025, he made headlines when he released the DeepSeek-R1 language model, which achieved performance on par with ChatGPT and reduced computing costs by 80%, causing Nvidia's stock to fall 17% in one day. Liang is now worth about $1 billion.

However, many warn that this boom could create a wider gap between rich and poor. As AI companies concentrate power and profits, shareholders will reap huge benefits, while the majority of workers risk being replaced by machines.

Despite the controversy, AI has officially ushered in a “new era of billionaires.” And as history shows, each major technology wave has been accompanied by its own legendary billionaires—from Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, to now Sam Altman and Jensen Huang.

(According to Economic Times)

Artificial intelligence is creating new billionaires at an unprecedented rate . AI startups and a wave of investment are creating a new generation of billionaires, with the speed and scale of wealth creation far surpassing previous tech booms.

Source: https://vietnamnet.vn/bien-ky-su-thanh-ty-phu-usd-tri-tue-nhan-tao-thoi-bung-ky-nguyen-lam-giau-moi-2433575.html