Ifwe’re in the middle of an AI market bubble, it’s still inflating. In January, Elon Musk’s SpaceX acquired xAI at a $250 billion valuation. Anthropic raised funds last month at a valuation of $380 billion. And, on February 27, billionaire Sam Altman’s OpenAI announced $110 billion in capital commitments as part of a fundraise that pegged the company at a mind-boggling $840 billion. Even companies with little revenue—and forget about profits—have become worth tens of billions of dollars, including AI robot startup Figure AI, AI model maker Z.ai and productless AI research firm Safe Superintelligence.

All of this has been very good for the cofounders, C-suite executives and investors behind these artificial intelligence companies. There are now at least 86 such AI billionaires on Forbes’ annual ranking of the world’s wealthiest people, worth a collective $2.9 trillion. Forty-five of them have become billionaires over just the past year.

The richest new AI billionaire of all is Surge AI founder Edwin Chen, worth an estimated $18 billion. His data labeling company isn’t necessarily worth that much more than its competitors, but by eschewing traditional venture capital he held onto a massive stake—more than 75%—of the firm. “I really do think that what we’re doing is so critical to all the AI models that without us, AGI [artificial general intelligence, tech lingo for when AI will match or surpass human capabilities] just won’t happen,” Chen told Forbes in September. “And I want it to happen.” The second richest is Liu Debing (estimated net worth: $9.1 billion), cofounder and chairman of Chinese AI firm Z.ai, which makes open AI models that compete with OpenAI and others. Debing became a billionaire after Z.ai’s explosive Hong Kong IPO in January. Third is Daniel Nadler ($7.6 billion) of OpenEvidence, which makes an AI search tool for doctors.

Some of this year’s fresh faces have become billionaires by driving deeper into the application layer—like Nadler and Qasar Younis, whose Applied Institution wants to bring AI not just to self-driving cars but to all vehicles. Ten new billionaires make this year’s list thanks to buzzy vibe coding—or, AI coding assistant—companies or other AI application software businesses, including the cofounders of Cursor, Lovable, Sierra, Harness and Cognition. Others have gotten rich building AI’s underlying infrastructure, including new data center billionaires such as Peter Salanki of CoreWeave, Michael Hsing of Monolithic Power Systems and Toby Neugebauer of Fermi America.

They join a long list of existing tech billionaires who are reaping the benefits of the AI boom. The 468 tech billionaires on Forbes’ billionaires list are now worth a record $4.8 trillion, up by $1.1 trillion from last year. Much of that gain was driven by Elon Musk (up nearly $500 billion thanks to the monstrous valuation of SpaceX’s merger with xAI) and Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin (up $113 billion and $99 billion, respectively) as Google, with its Gemini model, has reemerged as a big AI winner. Then there’s Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who is up $55.3 billion as AI chip giant Nvidia shares continue to soar.

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How long will all this last? During the dot-com era, every company became an impossibly valuable tech company. Then the bubble burst. Repeat, albeit to lesser extents, for software businesses in the 2010s and cloud businesses in 2022. Now, every company, from consultancies and research groups to medical firms and weapons manufacturers, is becoming an AI company.

There’s one big difference this time, though: These sky-high valuations are largely being determined not by public markets but by private investors. The venture capitalists and private equity firms (and, yes, a wide range of special-purpose vehicles, many of which may not have access to full company financials) that are investing in private AI companies seem all too willing to accept huge valuations in hopes of exponential returns.

Meanwhile, cracks have begun showing in the public markets. GPU landlord CoreWeave’s share price is less than half its peak last summer. Oracle stock skyrocketed last fall when it announced an earnings miss but massive spending on AI data centers, but fell on similar guidance in the subsequent months; Oracle cofounder and chief technology officer Larry Ellison’s net worth is down nearly $200 billion from September. And AI-powered nuclear startup Oklo’s two cofounders are no longer members of the billionaires club, after a 68% drop in the company’s share price.

But the party continues for most of the planet’s biggest AI firms, helping grow the billionaire ranks by dozens, with many more to come. Eventually these companies might have to prove they have staying power. If Anthropic ($380 billion valuation), OpenAI ($840 billion valuation) and SpaceX (more than $1 trillion valuation) all go public in the coming years, there could be a market correction. That, or we are all—perhaps literally—going to the moon.

Here’s a map of the notable new AI billionaires who joined Forbes’ World’s Billionaires list for the first time in 2026.

NET WORTHS ARE AS OF MARCH 1, 2026

Liu Debing ($9.1 billion) and Tang Jie ($1.9 billion) | Z.ai

Yan Junjie ($7.2 billion) | MiniMax

Piotr Dabkowski ($1.8 billion) and Mati Staniszewski ($1.8 billion) | ElevenLabs

​​Timothée Lacroix, Guillaume Lample, Arthur Mensch ($1.8 billion each) | Mistral

America’s AI model maker startups OpenAI and Anthropic got the richest, first. Now the AI fever is spreading worldwide: Chinese companies Zhipu, which rebranded to Z.ai last summer, and MiniMax soared in early 2026 IPOs, making cofounders Liu, Tang and Yan billionaires. But general-purpose AI models may be on their way to commoditization. Mistral’s bet on catering to big European enterprises is paying off; investors valued the company at $14 billion in September. ElevenLabs is a poster child for the value of voice-based models.

Edwin Chen ($18 billion) | Surge AI

Lucy Guo ($1.4 billion) | Scale AI

Brendan Foody, Adarsh Hiremath, Surya Midha ($2.2 billion each) | Mercor

We’ve gotten to the point where AI models have consumed—or stolen—all of the open internet data that could possibly train them. That leaves further advances up to humans, and often highly educated ones. There’s a lot of money in advanced (and usually AI-assisted) data labeling. The founders behind Surge, Scale and Mercor are making that happen for world’s leading AI labs.

The Software Applications & Vibe Coders

Arvid Lunnemark, Sualeh Asif, Aman Sanger, Michael Truell ($1.3 billion each) | Cursor

Aravind Srinivas, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho, and Andy Konwinski ($2.1 billion each) | Perplexity

Jyoti Bansal ($2.3 billion) | Harness

Fabian Hedin, Anton Osika ($1.6 billion each) | Lovable

Bret Taylor, Clay Bavor ($2.5 billion each) | Sierra

Steven Hao ($1.3 billion) | Cognition

If AI research labs are the first, this crop of companies is the second frontier of AI’s impact on our lives. Sierra ($10 billion valuation) offers AI customer service for businesses, while Harness ($5.5 billion valuation) AI-ifies the part of software engineering that happens after coding. It’s hard to meet an engineer not using an AI coding assistant like Anthropic’s Claude Code or Cursor. Valuations are hot but unstable, as it’s a little too easy to switch between companies if one suddenly gets better than another.

Planes, Doctors And Automobiles

Daniel Nadler ($7.6 billion) | OpenEvidence

Peter Ludwig, Qasar Younis ($1.5 billion) | Applied Intuition

Trae Stephens ($1 billion) | Anduril

Torsten Reil, Gundbert Scherf, Niklas Kohler ($2 billion each) | Helsing

AI is transforming traditional industries, too. OpenEvidence, which some call ChatGPT for doctors, raised funds at a $12 billion valuation in January, while Applied Intuition is worth some $15 billion on a bet that AI-powered software can drive everything from planes to automobiles to tanks. The latter will join a group of startups making autonomous weapons—like the U.S.-based Anduril and German company Helsing—amid a broader defense tech boom.

Michael Hsing ($1.8 billion) | Monolithic Power Systems

Pantas Sutardja ($1.4 billion) | Semiconductors

Robin Khuda ($2.1 billion) | Data centers

Jitendra Mohan, Sanjay Gajendra ($1 billion each) | Astera Labs

All technological revolutions aren’t purely in the “cloud.” There are physical components, too, that make AI’s intensive number crunching possible. These billionaires, almost all from publicly traded companies, are leading the charge. Not all of these companies are new entrants. Hsing founded Monolithic Power Systems all the way back in 1997, but it’s been a big AI boom winner thanks to its ability to manage the extreme power and heat density in AI data centers, and is now worth more than $50 billion (market cap). The bulk of Sutardja’s fortune comes from Marvell Technology, where he was chief technology officer; his late brother Sehat cofounded the company in 1995, and it’s surging thanks to custom AI chips and networking—especially important as we shift from training AI to using it.

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