Wealth | The Big Take
China’s Rising AI Billionaires
A new generation of entrepreneurs is challenging US dominance — and rapidly building huge fortunes on the back of China’s quest for technological independence.
Four years ago, as Yan Junjie pitched his vision for artificial intelligence startup MiniMax Group Inc. to China’s largest internet companies and tech investors, the response was unanimous — and brutal.
“They genuinely believed we were frauds,” Yan recalls of the response to his idea: a company built entirely around multi-modal AI, meaning it’s capable of processing text, images, audio and video together.
Today, Shanghai-based MiniMax is a multibillion-dollar firm, making him a billionaire at 36. Its models — which he obsessively benchmarks against OpenAI — are helping fuel a new wave of technological nationalism. Along with peers such as DeepSeek’s millennial quant prodigy Liang Wenfeng and Unitree Robotics’ Wang Xingxing, Yan belongs to a generation of Chinese entrepreneurs challenging US dominance in AI.
And the group is growing in size as a flurry of Chinese AI firms go public, amongst them MetaX Integrated Circuits Shanghai Co.’s Chen Weiliang and Moore Threads Technology Co.’s Zhang Jianzhong.
These new tycoons have amassed a collective $100.5 billion, rivaling Bill Gates's $105 billion net worth. While significant, this remains well below the $153 billion fortune of Jensen Huang, one of the primary beneficiaries of the AI hardware boom in the US.
Their rise during an escalating tech and geopolitical rift between the world’s superpowers underscores how wealth creation in China is now entwined with the state’s push for technological independence.
That shift has ushered in a new kind of tech elite in China. The era of the rock-star CEOs — exemplified by Jack Ma’s extroverted performance at an Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s anniversary party in 2017 — has given way to a generation of quiet geeks.
Today’s entrepreneurs shun the limelight — take Chen Tianshi of Cambricon Technologies Corp. A precocious youth who entered college at the age of 16, Chen rarely speaks to the press, preferring to call himself an “ordinary research guy”. DeepSeek’s Liang is equally elusive and is seldom photographed in public.
This discretion is strategic. For China’s new tech elite, a low profile is the best defense against two existential threats: being placed on a US sanctions list, and attracting the scrutiny of a domestic government that has soured on flamboyant displays of wealth.
“The climate of US-China relations is so toxic that they just don’t want to get caught up,” said Duncan Clark, chairman of Beijing-based investment advisory firm BDA China and a board member of nonprofit firm Asia Society. “For this generation, particularly if you’re taking government money or operating in the crosshairs of the US entity list, the goal is not to get caught.”
Overwhelmingly male and born in the 1970s and 80s, they share an elite academic background, often hailing from Tsinghua University or the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Many have worked under the state’s guidance for years. Cambricon’s Chen spent six years as a researcher at the state academy before founding the AI chipmaker. His wealth has surged more than 800% since the start of 2024 to $21.5 billion, driven directly by Beijing’s aggressive buy-local mandates.
The shift has also been marked by the return of veteran executives from US tech giants, a trend that was evident in December when a flurry of IPOs minted roughly half a dozen new billionaires — many were former employees of Nvidia Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
Zhang Jianzhong, a former Nvidia executive, built Moore Threads over the course of five years into a $45 billion company by promising to replace the very chips he used to sell. Similarly, Chen Weiliang, a former AMD senior director, plotted the strategy for MetaX in cafes while recruiting a number of AMD colleagues to become key managers at his company. These founders, once cogs in the American tech machine, have become its primary competitors in China.