DeepSeek creator becomes richest AI founder

DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfengʼs fortune has more than doubled since the companyʼs latest funding round, making him the worldʼs richest artificial intelligence modeler.

Bloomberg writes about this.

Liang is now worth an estimated $36 billion, up from an estimated $16.7 billion. Thatʼs significantly more than Anthropic co-founder Dario Amodei and OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman.

In its comparison, Bloomberg only considered companies whose core business and most of their revenue are directly related to developing AI models. The list did not include diversified corporations like Alibaba Group and Tencent Holdings, nor companies in the AI supply chain, such as data center operators or semiconductor manufacturers.

Most of Liang’s fortune comes from his stake in DeepSeek. The high demand for investment has increased the company’s valuation by about fivefold from the initial $10 billion reported in April. After a $7.4 billion funding round in June 2026, which valued DeepSeek at $50 billion and in which Liang himself invested $3 billion, his stake has shrunk to about 78%, according to Bloomberg estimates.

Unlike other Silicon Valley AI founders, Liang has retained an unusually large stake. In the US, building an advanced AI company valued at $50 billion typically requires handing over a significant portion of the company’s shares to tech giants and venture capitalists. By contrast, retaining nearly 78% of the shares significantly increases both Liang’s personal wealth and his control over the company—a rarity among AI founders today.

Liangʼs $36 billion fortune makes him the eighth richest person in China, just behind Chen Tianshi, an AI billionaire and co-founder of Cambricon Technologies.

What is DeepSeek?

In January 2025, DeepSeek overtook ChatGPT to briefly become the most popular free app on the App Store. On the same day, the Chinese chatbot was subjected to a massive cyberattack.

DeepSeek was founded in 2023 by Liang Wenfeng, a 40-year-old graduate of the School of Information and Electronic Engineering. He set up a store for Nvidia A100 chips, which are now banned from being exported to China. Media reports suggest that this may have prompted him to launch DeepSeek, combining these chips with cheaper, lower-end ones that are still available for import.

DeepSeek is based on the open-source DeepSeek-V3 model. Some experts say that the model was developed for less than $6 million — competitors spend much more. However, other experts dispute this information.

OpenAI, the creator of the artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT, said on January 29 that Chinese companies are “constantly” trying to use American competitors to improve their AI models.

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