Hong Kong – DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng’s net worth more than doubled after his firm’s most recent fundraising round, making the Chinese entrepreneur the world’s richest among creators of AI models.
Liang is now worth US$36 billion (S$46.5 billion), up from about US$16.7 billion previously, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
That ranks him well above OpenAI president Greg Brockman (No 100), with an estimated net worth of US$25.5 billion, and Anthropic co-founder Dario Amodei’s (No 491) whose fortune stands at US$7.98 billion.
Ironically, OpenAI co-founder and CEO Samuel Altman did not even make Bloomberg’s list of the Top 500 richest people. He is worth US$3.4 billion, according to Forbes’ real-time rankings.
In the ranking, Bloomberg looked at firms whose primary business and majority of revenue come directly from AI models, instead of other businesses in the AI supply chain – notably, data centres and semiconductors. As such it rules out Big Tech founders like Tesla and SpaceX’s Elon Musk, Google’s Larry Page, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang.
For Liang, most of his fortune is derived from his stake in DeepSeek. What sets him apart from his Silicon Valley peers is the sheer scale of his equity retention.
In the United States, building a US$50 billion frontier AI company typically requires giving up massive chunks of equity to tech giants and VCs. By contrast, maintaining a near-78 per cent stake in DeepSeek gives Liang a boost to his personal wealth and control that is unusual among modern AI founders.
While US giants like OpenAI and Anthropic command massive valuations approaching US$1 trillion, their equity is more fragmented across larger investor bases or multiple co-founders.
Strong demand for investment boosted DeepSeek’s valuation about fivefold from the initial US$10 billion reported in April. Following the start-up’s US$7.4 billion funding round in June 2026 – which valued the company at US$50 billion and saw Liang personally invest US$3 billion – his stake is estimated to have diluted to approximately 78 per cent, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Liang was born in 1985 in Zhanjiang, in China’s southern Guangdong province, where his father was an elementary school teacher. He studied electronic engineering at Zhejiang University, a prestigious college in the city of Hangzhou where he also earned a master’s degree in information and communication engineering.
Liang created DeepSeek in 2023 as an offshoot of the AI division of his hedge fund, Zhejiang High-Flyer Asset Management, which he set up with two former university classmates. The trio had begun trading as students during the global financial crisis.
Early on, High-Flyer used its massive trading profits to stockpile advanced graphics chips before US export restrictions tightened. Those early investments gave DeepSeek the computing power necessary to develop its breakthrough models without relying on traditional venture capital.
DeepSeek shocked the global tech industry in early 2025 by releasing a model that achieved performance comparable to US rivals like OpenAI, but at a fraction of the cost. The start-up is keeping up that momentum, recently showcasing its latest V4 model and publicly touting its compatibility with chips made by domestic tech giant Huawei Technologies.
For years, consumer internet tycoons like Alibaba’s Jack Ma defined tech wealth in China. That era is now giving way to state-backed artificial intelligence. The influx of state and corporate capital marks DeepSeek’s transition from a private software experiment into a critical national asset.
Liang’s US$36 billion fortune makes him China’s eighth-richest person, just behind Chen Tianshi, the hardware AI billionaire and Cambricon Technologies co-founder. BLOOMBERG
