Latest wealth ranking reflects the power of AI

AI's formidable power is fully reflected in the latest wealth ranking, with two new entrants, Liang Wenfeng from China's DeepSeek and Sam Altman from OpenAI, making it to the latest Hurun Global Rich List released on Thursday.

Rupert Hoogewerf, Hurun Report's chairman and chief researcher, said AI had a good year with shareholders of Nvidia, Alphabet, Oracle, Broadcom and Microsoft seeing their wealth growing significantly.

Jensen Huang saw his wealth break through the US$100 billion mark, despite owning just 3 percent of Nvidia shares, driven by Nvidia's dominance in AI-capable GPUs, the infrastructure of advancing AI technologies.

"Liang Wenfeng holds more than 80 percent of DeepSeek's shares, and if DeepSeek reaches OpenAI's current valuation of US$1 trillion, he is expected to be a strong contender for China's richest man," Hoogewerf said.

Hangzhou-based Liang Wenfeng, 40, took the 790th spot in the global ranking with US$4.5 billion, and Altman, with US$1.8 billion. was in 2,081st position.

Lei Jun is likely to top the Chinese billionaire ranking if he can successfully seize the wave of robot technology, Hoogewerf said, while other potential candidates also include new energy and battery technologies firm CATL's Zeng Yuqun, Binance's Zhao Changpeng, and Cambricon Technologies' Chen Tianshi.

Both China's software and hardware companies in the AI field have a strong presence on the wealth list.

On the hardware side, Tianshi grew his wealth more than four times to 87 billion yuan while Will Semiconductor founder and chairman Yu Renrong had 45 billion yuan, while TSMC's Chang Chung-Mou recorded 41 billion yuan.

On the algorithm front, SenseTime's Yang Qiumei had 9 billion yuan while both Moonshot AI's Yang Zhiling and Fourth Paradigm Dai Wenyuan & Wu Min were also included on the list with 7.3 billion yuan.

A total of 91 Chinese billionaires joined this year's list, based on the wealth calculation as of January 15, with Xiaomi's founder Lei Jun more than doubling his wealth to US$30 billion and a top 50 place.

The Hurun Global Rich List 2025 ranked 3,442 billionaires, up from 3,279 last year, from 2,524 companies and 71 countries.

The cut-off to make the Hurun Global Rich List Top 10 has almost doubled every five years, from US$36 billion a decade ago to US$67 billion five years ago and US$143 billion this year.

As many as 60 percent of this year's billionaires were not on the list 10 years ago, showing how wealth creation has dramatically changed with the advent of new technologies.

China has 823 billionaires, up nine, reversing two consecutive years of decline in its number of billionaires. The US overtook China for the first time since 2016 as the world capital for billionaires, with 870.

Shanghai became the Asian billionaire capital for the first time with home to 92 billionaires, five more compared with the previous year.

Elon Musk reclaimed the title of the wealthiest person for the fourth time in five years, and became the first individual to surpass the US$400 billion mark.