The value of public and private companies connected to AI has skyrocketed, and new billionaires have been created in the field.
by phoebe liuForbes staff
aA year and a half after ChatGPT debuted, artificial intelligence and OpenAI CEOs are talking about it at the dinner table Sam Altman It's almost a household name, and the AI ​​gold rush is in full swing. Over the past year, the stock prices of old and new tech companies have soared, the world's tech tycoons have gotten richer, and more than a dozen new AI billionaires have been created. forbes“List of the world's billionaires.
The head of all this is Nvidia's co-founder and CEO jensen fan. Nvidia's stock price has soared nearly 300% over the past year, putting Huang among the 20 richest people in the world for the first time. Several other companies rode the wave as well. Shares of the super microcomputer, which makes servers that process compute-intensive AI applications, performed even better than Nvidia, rising more than 10 times in the past year and more than any other company in the S&P 500. .and his wife Charles Liang and Sarah Liu, The New Billionaire. CEO of semiconductor company Advanced Micro Devices; lisa sue, AMD's stock price rose by 120%, which made him join the ranks of billionaires again this year. Also, Cloudflare, a cybersecurity company that relies heavily on AI, saw its stock price rise 86% and named him chief operating officer. Michelle Zatlin CEO boosted by new billionaire Matthew Prince's assets will increase from $2 billion to $3.4 billion in 2023.
Privately held AI companies are also emerging. According to Crunchbase, AI-focused startups raised nearly $50 billion in funding last year, even as venture investment in general was down. OpenAI is the largest of these, valued at around $80 billion or more after a reported $10 billion investment from Microsoft last January. CEO Altman has no shares in the company, but forbes Thanks to his network of venture investors, he estimates he is a billionaire. His two new billionaires from AI startups also join the list: Co-founder and CEO of Notion Ivan Chaobased on his stake in the $5 billion (estimated valuation) of a productivity app that is all about AI, and Brett Adcockfounder and CEO of $2.6 billion (valued) AI robot company Figure.
A significant portion of private company funding is coming from traditional tech giants like Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet, which are hoping to win what has become an AI arms race. For now, we don't know if or when the AI ​​bubble will burst and the funding will dry up, but some cracks are starting to show. Inflection AI, co-founded by billionaire investor Reid Hoffman, has abandoned Chatbot, along with his two other co-founders and other researchers. He left the company in March to take an AI position at Microsoft.
Here are nine new billionaires with AI-related companies.
Net assets are as of March 8, 2024.
Charles Liang
Net worth: $6.1 billion | Source of wealth: computer hardware | Country: we
Mr. Liang co-founded the IT infrastructure company Super Micro Computer in 1993. Its server and storage systems are currently in great demand among AI and cloud computing companies. Fiscal year 2023 sales reached a record $7 billion. The stock is up more than 1,100% in the past 12 months, outpacing even its own chip manufacturing partners like Nvidia, Intel, and AMD. Mr. Liang's wife, Sarah Liu, is a senior vice president at Supermicro and a new billionaire.
Kwak Dong Shin
Net worth: $2.9 billion | Source of wealth: semiconductor | Country: South Korea
Mr. Shin runs Hanmi Semiconductor, which his father founded in 1980. Hanmi manufactures equipment used in semiconductor packaging, one of the final stages of chip production. Major customers include Samsung Electronics and his SK Hynix. Business is booming thanks to the AI ​​boom, with the stock up more than 560% in the past year.
Shunsaku Sagami
Net worth: $1.9 billion | Source of wealth: M&A brokerage | Country: Japan
The 33-year-old M&A Institute acts as a matchmaker between small and medium-sized business sellers. We use AI to find potential buyers for these costumes. These costumes are often owned by elderly people who are dealing with inheritance issues and want to make some cash. Sagami's company will be listed in Tokyo in 2022.
Ivan Chao
Net worth: 1.5 billion dollars | Source of wealth: concept | Country: we
The co-founder and CEO of productivity startup Notion is a far cry from 2015, when he and co-founder Simon Last laid off all of their employees, sublet their San Francisco office and moved to Kyoto, Japan. Masu. Currently profitable, Notion is fully committed to his AI and is valued at approximately $5 billion from secondary market transactions with an estimated $250 million in revenue.
Brett Adcock
Net worth: $1.4 billion | Source of wealth: robot | Country: we
Figure, which Adcock founded in 2022, is working to create “general-purpose humanoids” using AI and introduce these robots into the workforce. In February, the company raised $675 million at a valuation of $2.6 billion from leading investors including Jeff Bezos, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and OpenAI. Mr Adcock, 37, owns an estimated 50%.
lisa sue
Net worth: $1.3 billion | Source of wealth: semiconductor | Country: we
Advanced Micro Devices' stock has increased more than 60 times since Mr. Hsu took over in 2014 and transformed the struggling semiconductor company into an AI darling. The daughter of a mathematician and bookkeeper turned entrepreneur, Sue was born in Taiwan and moved to New York City when she was three years old. She studied electrical engineering at MIT because her major seemed the most difficult.
Michelle Zatlin
Net worth: $1.2 billion | Source of wealth: cyber security | Country: Canada
Zatlyn's Cloudflare employs AI to protect customers and thwart cyberattacks. The San Francisco-based company also offers space in the cloud for developers to build their own AI models. A native of Canada, Zatlin studied chemistry at McGill University in Montreal and worked at Google and Toshiba before co-founding Cloudflare in 2009 with his Harvard Business School classmate, CEO and billionaire Matthew Prince. . COO Zatlin owns about 2% of the company, which has soared 65% since last year.
Sam Altman
Net worth: 1 billion dollars | Source of wealth: investment | Country: we
The CEO of OpenAI, which sparked the AI ​​explosion with the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, owns no shares in the company, which is estimated to be worth more than $80 billion. Instead, the 38-year-old, who was dramatically fired and rehired by OpenAI last November, has been busy talking about investments he made as president of startup incubator Y Combinator from 2014 to 2019, an early bet on Stripe, and Reddit. and has made his fortune thanks to his stake in Reddit. Nuclear fusion startup Helion.
harvey jones
Net worth: 1 billion dollars | Source of wealth: Nvidia | Country: we
Mr. Jones, a longtime technology investor and entrepreneur, is a founding board member of Nvidia and owns 0.03% of its stock. This is enough to make him one of the biggest beneficiaries of his 300% boom in Nvidia stock since last year leveraging AI.