China's deepening real estate crisis is crushing household wealth and hurting the fortunes of some of the world's richest people, but a new class of AI-era billionaires is rapidly emerging.
This year's outstanding winners come from China's most popular AI chip sector.
On Wednesday, shares of MetaX Integrated Circuits Shanghai, a GPU startup founded by a former AMD executive, soared as much as 755% on its first day of trading on the Shanghai Stock Exchange's technology-heavy STAR market, before closing at around 700%.
This rapid growth has catapulted the company's chairman and co-founder, Chen Weiliang, into one of China's fastest-growing tech tycoons. Chen's MetaX shares are worth about $6.5 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Other early insiders also saw impressive paper profits.
MetaX's other two co-founders and co-chief technology officers, Peng Li and Yang Jian, own stakes worth hundreds of millions of dollars after its blockbuster debut, according to Bloomberg calculations.
China's AI rush
Chen's rise follows that of another GPU entrepreneur, Zhang Jianzhong, founder and CEO of Moore Threads Technology.
After his company's successful IPO earlier this month, Zhang's net worth soared to $4.3 billion, continuing a wave of investor enthusiasm for domestic semiconductor companies.
The richest man in China's AI chip industry is Chen Tianxi, co-founder and CEO of Cambricon Technologies, dubbed “China's Nvidia” by retail traders.
Cambricon University's Chen is currently worth $22.5 billion, making him the 16th richest person in the country on Bloomberg's list. He is the 115th richest person in the world.
This new fortune reflects a rapid shift in investor sentiment.
China's AI and semiconductor stocks have plummeted since the breakthrough of the Chinese-made AI model DeepSeek-R1, which was released in January. The model has sparked a rise in the stock prices of local tech companies, pushing the Hang Seng Tech Index up more than 20% since the beginning of the year.
The Washington government's tightening of export controls on advanced NVIDIA chips also contributed to the boom.
These restrictions on high-end AI processors prevent China from accessing cutting-edge U.S. hardware and increase Beijing's reliance on domestic suppliers..
Still, China's new AI billionaires are still far from the top of the country's richest rankings. The upper echelons are still dominated by long-established big players.
At the top is Zhong Shanshan, the humble bottled water giant behind Nongfu Spring, who is worth $68.1 billion, according to Bloomberg.
Tencent co-founder and CEO Pony Ma is in second place with $66.5 billion, with his wealth increasing 38% this year after Tencent's AI-fueled share price rise, while ByteDance co-founder Zhang Yiming is in third place with $65.2 billion.
