Business Finance Media Technology Policy Wealth Insights Interviews

Art Art Fairs Art Market Art Reviews Auctions Galleries Museums Interviews

Lifestyle Nightlife & Dining Style Travel Interviews

Power Lists Nightlife & Dining Art A.I. PR

About About Observer Advertise With Us Reprints

12 Immigrant Founders Driving America’s A.I. Boom

Twelve immigrant founders now lead companies worth $470 billion, highlighting the global roots of the A.I. economy.

For all the talk of A.I. as a Silicon Valley arms race, many of the companies driving the industry were built by founders whose stories began outside the U.S. Some—like Elon Musk and Ali Ghodsi—now lead companies valued at more than $100 billion. Others, including Fei-Fei Li, Yann LeCun, and Daniela Rus, helped pioneer the research now fueling multibillion-dollar startups. Together, the 12 founders on this list lead companies worth at least $470 billion, underscoring how much of the A.I. economy is being shaped by people who first came to the U.S. as students, researchers, refugees, and entrepreneurs.

Sign Up For Our Daily Newsletter

Thank you for signing up!

By clicking submit, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge we may use your information to send you emails, product samples, and promotions on this website and other properties. You can opt out anytime.

Elon Musk, founder of xAI; co-founder of OpenAI and Neuralink

Path to the U.S.: Born in Pretoria, South Africa, in 1971, Musk moved to Canada at age 17 and attended Queen’s University before transferring to the University of Pennsylvania in the U.S., where he studied physics and economics. He moved to Silicon Valley in 1995, briefly enrolled in a Stanford Ph.D. program, but left after two days to co-found Zip2, an early internet startup. He later co-founded X.com, the online banking company that became part of PayPal, and became a U.S. citizen in 2002. Why he matters in A.I.: Musk helped launch OpenAI in 2015 as a nonprofit counterweight to Google’s DeepMind, but left the organization in 2018. He later sued OpenAI, accusing the company of abandoning its original mission; that case has since been dismissed. In 2023, Musk founded xAI, which launched the ChatGPT rival Grok. The company, worth $250 billion, is now part of SpaceX, giving Musk a way to tie A.I. to his larger empire of rockets, satellites, social media and payments. Neuralink, meanwhile, reflects his longer-running interest in linking machines more closely with the human brain. On a broader level, Musk is not building a single A.I. startup so much as folding the technology into his wider “X” ecosystem.

Ali Ghodsi, co-founder and CEO of Databricks

Path to the U.S.: Born in Tehran in 1978, Ghodsi fled Iran with his family as a child and grew up in Sweden, according to Forbes. He moved to the U.S. in 2009 as a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, where he worked on Apache Spark, the open-source data processing project that later became the foundation for Databricks. He co-founded the company in 2013 with several Berkeley researchers.

Why he matters in A.I.: While Databricks is not a consumer-facing chatbot company, it sits at the center of the enterprise A.I. boom. Its unique “lakehouse” platform helps companies organize, manage and analyze massive amounts of data, the raw material needed to build and run A.I. systems. That has made Ghodsi one of the industry’s most important infrastructure founders: less visible than........

© Observer