The single richest person in AI isn't at OpenAI or Anthropic. It's Chen Tianshi, founder of a [Chinese chip company](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambricon_Technologies) and he's worth \~$40B.
It's surprising to me that there's no list of billionaires whose fortune comes primarily from AI. People must be searching online for and AI billionaires list? Maybe it's just me, but I wanted to share net-worth estimates for the [richest AI billionaires](https://futuresearch.ai/ai-researcher-net-worth/), specifically because I saw a name I'd never heard of at the top of the list. Chen Tianshi holds a 28.4% direct stake in Cambricon Technologies (market cap of $140B). At that price his stake is worth $39.6B, which matches the $40B on Bloomberg's Billionaires Index.
The $40B is the direct stake only. He also holds around 7.27% indirectly through Beijing Aixi, which pushes the top of my range toward $50B. When putting this together I caught a stale pre-surge market cap and a wrong CNY/USD rate feeding into the number, and correcting them showed just how much Chen's wealth depends on a single move in Cambricon's stock.
Probably most interesting to this group is how different Chen Tianshi's risk profile is from the private-company founders below him on my list. Nearly everyone else holds illiquid founder equity dependent on a funding round or IPO repricing them. But for Chen Tianshi, his paper fortune is a bet on one equity holding up. Anyone else aware of this guy?