From helping you answer emails to translating legal documents, artificial intelligence is now a part of almost all facets of life.
Meanwhile, organisations from Microsoft and Apple to the NHS have piled vast sums of funding into the latest intelligent software.
And for the few people behind this AI boom, there have been enormous profits to be made.
Leading the pack as the richest of new AI billionaires is Jensen Huang, CEO of chipmaker Nvidia, with a staggering net-worth of £113 billion ($151bn).
Mr Huang joins several monumental big tech figures, such as Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, who have recently made huge investments in AI.
But it isn’t just the heads of massive, established companies which have been making themselves extraordinarily wealthy from AI.
At just 26 years old, Alexandr Wang has now become the youngest self-made billionaire with a net worth of £2.7 billion (£3.6bn) thanks to his company Scale AI.
So, here are the richest and youngest AI-billionaires who have been making a fortune from the big tech boom.
Jensen Huang: £113 billion ($151bn). Mr Huang is the co-founder and CEO of Nvidia, the world’s largest producer of the advanced computer chips that enable AIs like ChatGPT or Meta AI to operate
Jensen Huang: £113 billion ($151bn)
Jensen Huang, 62, is the co-founder and CEO of Nvidia, the world’s largest producer of the powerful chips used in AI.
Known for his signature leather jacket and rockstar-style public appearances, Mr Huang has led Nvidia to become the first ever $4-trillion company in July.
Nvidia initially specialised in advanced graphics cards needed for video rendering and high-end gaming computers.
However, those chips soon became indispensable to the growing AI industry due to their ability to perform the computations that power AIs like ChatGPT.
As more companies have invested in AI data centres and developed their own models, Nvidia’s valuation has only risen.
Mr Huang owns three per cent of Nvidia, with those shares becoming worth 300 per cent more valuable in the last year.
The explosive growth in AI revenues worldwide has made Mr Huang one of the world’s 20 richest people.
Alexandr Wang: £2.7 billion (£3.6bn). Mr Wang became the youngest self-made billionaire in 2021 thanks to the success of his data-labelling company Scale AI
Alexandr Wang: £2.7 billion (£3.6bn)
In 2016, at the age of just 19, Alexandr Wang dropped out of MIT to launch his company Scale AI.
The startup provides the tools for companies to put their raw data to work in AI and machine learning applications.
Now, Scale AI has over 300 clients, including giants like General Motors, Google, and Meta.
Mr Wang, now 28 years old, owns an estimated 14 per cent of Scale AI, which was valued at £10.5 billion ($14bn) in 2024.
In 2021, that made Mr Wang the youngest ever self-made billionaire.
Sam Altman: £1.4 billion ($1.9bn)
Possibly one of the most well-known names in the world of AI, Sam Altman, 40, is the CEO of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT.
Sam Altman: £1.4 billion ($1.9bn). Possibly one of the most well-known names in the world of AI, Mr Altman is the CEO of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, but owes his wealth to private investments
Mr Altman’s fortunes began when he sold his social-mapping company Loopt for £32 million ($42 million) in 2012.
Using that money, Mr Altman started his own venture capital investment fund.
After a stint as the CEO of the startup accelerator Y Combinator, Mr Altman was hired as CEO of OpenAI in 2019.
At the time, OpenAI was already worth £60 billion ($80 billion), but that value has now risen to an estimated £225 billion ($300bn).
However, Mr Altman does not own any equity in the AI giant and owes his vast fortune to his other investments.
Primarily, Mr Altman’s status as a billionaire comes from investments in Stripe, Reddit and the nuclear fusion firm Helion.
Phil Shawe: £1.3 billion ($1.8bn)
Phil Shawe, 55, is the founder and co-CEO of the AI translation and language firm TransPerfect.
Phil Shawe: £1.3 billion ($1.8bn). Mr Shawe’s translation company, TransPerfect, turned over £976 million ($1.3 billion) in revenue during 2024
TransPerfect is now one of the largest translation services in the world and offers translation and localisation services for industries from gaming and film to law and healthcare.
Mr Shawe owns 99 per cent of the company, which turned over £976 million ($1.3 billion) in revenue during 2024.
Mr Shawe founded the company out of his New York University dorm room with his then-girlfriend in 1992.
However, following a messy legal battle, a Delaware judge approved Mr Shawe buying his previous partner for £578 million ($770m) due to ‘complete dysfunction’ between the pair.
Dario Amodei: £901 million ($1.2bn)
In 2021, seven of Sam Altman’s OpenAI employees defected from the company to start their own firm called Anthropic.
Dario Amodei, 42, CEO of Anthropic, founded the company with his sister Daniela Amodei, who serves as president.
Prior to founding Anthropic, Mr Amodei had been vice president of research at OpenAI.
Dario Amodei: £901 million ($1.2bn). Mr Amodei is the CEO of Anthropic, an AI firm he founded alongside six other former OpenAI employees, including his sister Daniela Amodei. All seven are now billionaires
Mr Amodei’s most significant contribution was the creation of ‘reinforcement learning’, which allows AIs to learn from human feedback.
By March of this year, Anthropic had grown to be worth £46.2 billion ($61.5bn) and has now made Mr Amodei a billionaire.
Liang Wenfeng: £751 million ($1bn)
The Chinese entrepreneur Liang Wenfeng, 40, was almost entirely unheard of in the West up until last year.
That all changed when the large language model DeepSeek-R1 rocked global tech markets.
DeepSeek was able to outperform rival ChatGPT on some metrics while costing only five per cent as much to operate.
DeepSeek’s arrival onto the market was so explosive that Nvidia’s share price plummeted by 17 per cent in one day, wiping out £451 ($600bn) in value.
Mr Wenfeng, CEO and founder of DeepSeek, now has an estimated net worth of £751 million ($1bn).
Liang Wenfeng: £751 million ($1bn). Having started his career as the head of a Hedge Fund, Chinese entrepreneur Liang Wenfeng used the profits of his investments to create DeepSeek, an AI which rivalled ChatGPT for a fraction of the cost
Unlike many other tech billionaires, Mr Wenfeng does not come from a computer engineering background.
Instead, Mr Wenfeng started his career as the founder of a hedge fund called High-Flyer.
Yao Runhao: £977 million ($1.3bn)
Yao Runhao, 37, founded the game development company Paper Games in 2013 and now serves as chairman and CEO.
Although the game developer is little known in the West, the company is wildly popular in China.
Each month, roughly six million people play Mr Runhao’s AI dating simulator, Love and Deepspace – that is equivalent to three-quarters of London’s population.
The virtual dating game uses AI to create virtual love interests that offer flirtatious responses to phone calls with players.
Paper games now employs about 2,000 staff to produce games which are almost entirely marketed to Chinese women.
HALF OF CURRENT JOBS WILL BE LOST TO AI WITHIN 15 YEARS
Kai-Fu Lee, the author of AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order, told Dailymail.com the world of employments was facing a crisis ‘akin to that faced by farmers during the industrial revolution.’
Half of current jobs will be taken over by AI within 15 years, one of China’s leading AI experts has warned.
Kai-Fu Lee, the author of bestselling book AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order, told Dailymail.com the world of employments was facing a crisis ‘akin to that faced by farmers during the industrial revolution.’
‘People aren’t really fully aware of the effect AI will have on their jobs,’ he said.
Lee, who is a VC in China and once headed up Google in the region, has over 30 years of experience in AI.
He believes it is imperative to ‘warn people there is displacement coming, and to tell them how they can start retraining.’
Luckily, he said all is not lost for humanity.
‘AI is powerful and adaptable, but it can’t do everything that humans do.’
Lee believe AI cannot create, conceptualize, or do complex strategic planning, or undertake complex work that requires precise hand-eye coordination.
He also says it is poor at dealing with unknown and unstructured spaces.
Crucially, he says AI cannot interact with humans ‘exactly like humans’, with empathy, human-human connection, and compassion.
