Liang Wenfeng, the founder of DeepSeek, has made headlines by becoming the world's richest AI billionaire, with a staggering net worth of $36 billion. This remarkable increase follows a recent funding round that saw his wealth more than double from $16.7 billion. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Liang has now surpassed prominent figures such as Dario Amodei, co-founder of Anthropic, and Greg Brockman, co-founder of OpenAI, to claim the top spot among AI entrepreneurs.

The Bloomberg ranking focuses exclusively on companies whose core business is directly linked to AI models, excluding diversified tech giants like Alibaba and Tencent, as well as chip manufacturers and data centers. Most of Liang's wealth stems from his substantial stake in DeepSeek, which has seen its valuation skyrocket from $10 billion in April to $50 billion after a $7.4 billion funding round in June.

During this funding round, Liang also invested an additional $3 billion into the company, maintaining a remarkable 78% ownership stake, a rarity for a large-scale AI startup. DeepSeek was established in 2023, building on the AI division of the Zhejiang High-Flyer Asset Management hedge fund, which Liang co-founded. Prior to the tightening of chip export controls by the U.S., the fund accumulated a significant amount of high-performance GPUs, providing the computational foundation for DeepSeek's AI models without heavy reliance on venture capital.

In early 2025, DeepSeek gained attention for launching an AI model that competes effectively with OpenAI's products while incurring significantly lower development costs. Recently, the company introduced its V4 model, which can operate on chips developed by Huawei.

Bloomberg highlights a key distinction between Liang and other AI founders in the U.S.: the ownership structure. While companies like OpenAI and Anthropic must share ownership with multiple investors and co-founders to scale, Liang retains nearly 80% of DeepSeek. This unique position allows his personal wealth to grow alongside the company's increasing valuation.

With a net worth of $36 billion, Liang Wenfeng is now the eighth richest person in China, following Chen Tianshi, co-founder of AI chip company Cambricon Technologies.