Assets | Rich through artificial intelligence

Deep Seek founder Liang Wenfeng was able to increase his wealth almost explosively. Photo: Imago/VCG It's old news that the rich are getting richer. What is less known is what is currently the fastest way to increase wealth. This is now being analyzed in a study by the financial portal BestBrokers.com in Varna, Bulgaria. Result: “The AI ​​boom is creating new billionaires at an unprecedented rate,” as data analyst Paul Hoffman explains.

The authors examined the development of assets between July 2025 and July 2026 using figures from the Forbes list. Accordingly, the tech moguls increased their total assets by more than a trillion US dollars during the period; A large part can be traced back to the area of ​​artificial intelligence. Liang Wenfeng, founder of Deep-Seek, an up-and-coming Chinese developer of large language models, recorded the highest increase. According to the information, the 41-year-old's estimated wealth rose from $1 billion at the end of July 2025 to $39.5 billion - an increase of a whopping 3,850 percent.

The seven founders of Anthropic have also grown rapidly in the past twelve months - their assets increased almost 13-fold within a year to a total of $15.5 billion. The reason is the development of the stock market valuation of your company, which climbed to $965 billion. This made Anthropic the most valuable AI start-up in the world, leaving even its competitor and chat GPT developer OpenAI behind.

The rapid increase in wealth in the AI ​​sector is largely based on rising company stock valuations. Analyst Hoffman assumes that “the assets of the founders and CEOs of AI companies will continue to grow in the foreseeable future,” as he explains when asked by nd. »As AI requires more and more energy, infrastructure and chips, the people who provide them will continue to increase their wealth.«

For him, the example of Liang Wenfeng shows how a well-financed newcomer can close the gap to the previous leaders within a few months. The downside: "There is no guarantee that today's market leader will still hold this position next year."

And in fact, things can go in the other direction just as quickly: Oracle main shareholder Larry Ellison's assets fell by almost half to a still impressive $151.9 billion during the period. The Texas software and hardware manufacturer's share price plummeted as investors doubt whether the company can afford the planned spending on expanding its AI infrastructure given its high level of debt - wiping out much of the previous share price gains due to AI-driven cloud demand.

At the same time, such examples have so far been of little importance, especially since the AI ​​value chain has broadened significantly - it ranges from chip manufacturers and cloud providers to energy suppliers and infrastructure providers to developers of business software. This is proven by another data analysis from BestBrokers.com: In the S&P 500, the most important stock index in the United States, 218 of the 503 listed companies are now “directly linked to the AI ​​economy,” it says. In two years their number has increased almost sixfold. While these companies currently make up 43.3 percent of all stocks in the S&P 500, their market capitalization even accounts for over 62 percent. According to the information, together they have a market value of 42.39 trillion US dollars. The 58 core companies in the AI ​​industry alone – those that develop chips, models, software and security solutions for AI – bring in $32.2 trillion.

The rapid development could indicate the formation of a speculative bubble, which some economists have long been warning about bursting. For analyst Hoffman, this is a “matter of interpretation.” Some companies have speculative pricing that “looks suspiciously like a bubble,” he says. However, this does not apply to every AI-related company in the index. While the share price increase at chip manufacturer Nvidia corresponds to the profit development, the software company Palantir is trading at almost 250 times earnings, which "represents a large gap between price and earnings."

The biggest winners on the stock markets over the past two years are relatively unknown companies with a focus on AI infrastructure: Lumentum Holdings, a specialist in high-performance lasers and optoelectronic components, achieved an increase of 1,194.6 percent. This is followed by Western Digital (+788.7%) - the hard drive manufacturer is benefiting from the enormous demand for data and data center storage.

“Artificial intelligence is increasingly less about who develops the most intelligent models and more about who enables them to be operated on a large scale,” says Alan Goldberg from Best-Brokers.com, explaining the development. »Investing in AI has evolved into an ecosystem that encompasses almost every sector of the economy, making it more difficult than ever to separate traditional industries from technology.«

This can also be seen in the increase in personal assets beyond classic AI: Yuan Fugen is in second place with an increase of 411.76 percent, as the shares of his metal processing company Suzhou Dongshan Precision Manufacturing from near Shanghai rose sharply. The main reason: the strong demand for electronic assemblies in data centers.

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