AI was all anyone could talk about in 2025. But while talk is cheap, AI companies’ valuations certainly aren’t. This year, AI was a huge wealth generator for the entrepreneurs building out models, infrastructure and applications that are quickly becoming part of everyday life, helping mint more than 50 new billionaires.

The year began with a moment that turned the intensity in the AI race up to 11. In January, Chinese AI startup DeepSeek’s open-source model, which it trained with a fraction of the computing power required by the big American AI companies, rattled financial markets and catapulted founder Liang Wenfeng to billionaire status. His net worth is now an estimated $11.5 billion.

In the early months of the year, Anthropic, developer of AI model Claude, raised $3.5 billion in funding at a $61.5 billion valuation, vaulting all seven of its cofounders into the billionaire ranks. The company went on to raise a total of $16.5 billion from investors this year alone and boosted its valuation to $183 billion in September. Massive funding rounds for AI companies were no rarity: This year, investors poured more than $200 billion into the AI sector, with AI startups capturing 50% of all global funding—up 16% from 2024, according to Crunchbase.

Startups weren’t just raising money. They were spending it too, with massive commitments to build out AI infrastructure. In January, President Trump announced OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle would spend $500 billion on a huge data center project called Stargate. The announcement marked the start of a flurry of activity from tech companies like Meta, Alphabet and Microsoft that each committed upwards of $65 billion to building AI infrastructure this year alone. Thanks to the voracious appetite for data centers, a number of different companies creating the building blocks for AI minted more than a dozen new billionaires this year—including the cofounders of semiconductor networking firm Astera Labs, data center real estate firm Fermi, Korean chips maker ISU Petasys, Korean electrical transformer manufacturer Sanil Electric and cloud computing provider CoreWeave among others.

The race to develop AI wasn’t limited to models or data centers. A talent war among tech companies offering handsome packages to poach top AI talent culminated in June, with Meta buying a 49% stake in data labeling startup Scale AI for more than $14 billion. As part of the deal, 28-year-old CEO and cofounder Alexandr Wang, who first became a billionaire in 2022 thanks to his stake in Scale, joined Meta as chief AI officer. The deal, which valued Scale AI at around $29 billion, briefly made Wang’s cofounder Lucy Guo, 31, the world’s youngest self-made woman billionaire, worth an estimated $1.4 billion (she left the company in 2018, but held onto her stock).

Meta’s new ownership stake in Scale AI made room for other data labeling startups to step up. Surge AI founder Edwin Chen’s estimated 75% stake in the Scale AI rival is worth an estimated $18 billion—the company’s $1.2 billion in revenue last year gave the company a $24 billion valuation, according to Forbes estimates. Data labeller Mercor hit a $10 billion valuation in October after a $250 million funding round, making its three 22-year-old........

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