Over the past three years, those who have become wealthy from the AI wave have mostly been a select few from Silicon Valley's elite, such as Nvidia's Jensen Huang or OpenAI's Sam Altman, but the situation has now completely changed.
According to Bloomberg's announcement, within the past 12 months alone, AI startups have created up to 19 new billionaires with combined wealth of up to $59.3 billion.
Among them, AI chipmaking company Cerebras Systems has made a major entry into the stock market, and the company's CEO Andrew Feldman and Chief Technology Officer Sean Lie have become new billionaires within a single day.
The distinctive characteristic of these newly emerging billionaires is that they don't build large foundation models themselves, but rather use existing AI systems to create software tailored to other business sectors such as legal, healthcare, customer service, and software development.
Because this technology can be applied widely across locations, companies like Harvey, Replit, and Vercel have seen their valuations skyrocket.
However, on the other hand, leading technology companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are developing systems that can operate directly without needing other companies' proprietary software, which also presents competitive challenges for these newly emerged billionaires.
For current stock investors, large well-known companies like Nvidia, Microsoft, and Alphabet will continue to be able to provide returns.
However, the truly significant profits are found among small private companies that haven't yet sold shares to the public.
Since major companies like OpenAI are preparing to enter the stock market in the second half of 2026, it is estimated that those who will become wealthy from AI going forward could be as much as twice as many as there are now.
Ref: Yahoo Finance
