Artificial intelligence dominated headlines, investments, and wealth creation in 2025 like no other sector, transforming entrepreneurs into billionaires at an unprecedented pace and solidifying AI’s role in everyday work and life.
According to Forbes, more than 50 new billionaires emerged from the AI ecosystem this year, driven by explosive valuations, massive funding rounds exceeding $200 billion globally, which captured 50% of all venture capital, up 16% from 2024 per Crunchbase, and infrastructure commitments rivaling national budgets. The year kicked off with a shockwave in January when Chinese startup DeepSeek released an open-source large language model trained with dramatically less compute than U.S. counterparts, sending ripples through markets and instantly elevating founder Liang Wenfeng to billionaire status with an estimated net worth of $11.5 billion.
U.S. frontrunner Anthropic, developer of the Claude model family, raised $3.5 billion early in the year at a $61.5 billion valuation, propelling all seven cofounders—including siblings Daniela and Dario Amodei—into the billionaire ranks for the first time. The company went on to secure a total of $16.5 billion in funding across rounds, culminating in a September valuation of $183 billion.
Register for Tekedia Mini-MBA edition 19 (Feb 9 – May 2, 2026): big discounts for early bird.
Tekedia AI in Business Masterclass opens registrations.
Join Tekedia Capital Syndicate and co-invest in great global startups.
Register for Tekedia AI Lab: From Technical Design to Deployment (next edition begins Jan 24 2026).
Infrastructure became the year’s defining theme. In January, President Donald Trump announced the $500 billion Stargate data center initiative involving OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle—sparking a cascade of commitments from tech giants. Meta, Alphabet, and Microsoft each pledged upwards of $65 billion toward AI compute facilities, fueling a data center construction frenzy that minted over a dozen new billionaires among suppliers and enablers.
Semiconductor networking firm Astera Labs saw its cofounders enter billionaire territory amid surging demand for high-bandwidth interconnects. Data center real estate player Fermi and Korean manufacturers ISU Petasys (chips) and Sanil Electric (transformers) similarly benefited from hyperscaler buildouts. Cloud provider CoreWeave, backed by Nvidia, achieved multibillion-dollar status, enriching its founders through explosive growth in GPU cloud services.
The talent and data wars intensified. In June, Meta acquired a 49% stake in data labeling leader Scale AI for over $14 billion, valuing the company at approximately $29 billion. The deal appointed 28-year-old CEO Alexandr Wang—already a billionaire since 2022—as Meta’s chief AI officer, while briefly making cofounder Lucy Guo (31, departed 2018 but retained equity) the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire at $1.4 billion.
Rivals filled the vacuum: Surge AI founder Edwin Chen reached an estimated $18 billion net worth via his 75% stake in the company, which hit a $24 billion valuation on $1.2 billion in 2024 revenue. Data labeling startup Mercor soared to $10 billion in October after a $250 million round, turning its three 22-year-old cofounders into the youngest self-made billionaires ever, each worth around $2.2 billion.
Multimodal AI captured imaginations in September with OpenAI’s Sora 2 launch, flooding social media with hyper-realistic generated videos and images. Billions flowed into image, video, and audio startups, notably ElevenLabs, whose AI voice synthesis platform raised $100 million at a $6.6 billion valuation in October, minting billionaires out of cofounders Mati Staniszewski and Piotr Dabkowski.
Workplace adoption accelerated dramatically: Gallup surveys showed weekly AI usage doubling from 11% in 2023 to 23% in 2025, with even higher penetration among developers. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella—himself newly minted a billionaire through stock performance—revealed up to 30% of the company’s code was AI-generated. Coding tool Cursor from Anysphere reached a $29 billion valuation in November, creating four new billionaire cofounders.
Companies heavily leveraging AI, including video game developer Paper Games, translation software firm TransPerfect, and Chinese robotics maker Orbbec, propelled their founders into the billionaire ranks. As AI permeates industries from software to manufacturing, 2025’s wealth creation wave, fueled by unprecedented capital concentration and technological breakthroughs, marks the sector’s transition from hype to economic powerhouse. It has reshaped global billionaire lists and is expected to set the stage for even greater transformations ahead.