Meet The Asian Billionaires Powering The Global AI Boom |
Artificial intelligence is driving a record boom in stock markets and creating vast riches that have propelled the collective fortune of the world’s 3,428 billionaires to $20.1 trillion this year. While the leaders of technology giants such as Nvidia and Google parent Alphabet are the faces of the AI boom, behind their stratospheric gains is a supply chain deeply rooted in Asia—which, in turn, is boosting the fortunes of tycoons from China to South Korea.
Amid a continued shift of semiconductor production away from the West, more than 70% of chips used globally are now produced in Asia, J.P. Morgan Asset Management noted in a November research report. The demand for chips used to train AI has propelled the net worth of Morris Chang, the 94-year-old founder of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), to $8.4 billion from $4.1 billion a year ago. It also boosted the share price of South Korea’s printed circuit board maker ISU Petasys, making Kim Sang-beom, 65-year-old chairman of its holding company ISU Group, a new member of the three-comma club with a $1.8 fortune tied to the AI wave.
Asia is also gaining a strong foothold in data centers. By 2030, there will be $800 billion in related investments across the region that will account for 40% of global capacity, according to credit rating and research firm Moody’s. Mukesh Ambani, chairman and managing director of Reliance Industries and Asia’s richest person with a net worth of $99.7 billion, announced in February that he would earmark $110 billion to build AI infrastructure across India over the next seven years. In the same month, Gautam Adani, the chairman of Adani Group, with a fortune of $63.8 billion, said he would invest $100 billion by 2035 to build data centers across the country.
And China, with its longstanding tech race with the U.S., has seen its AI technology being taken up globally—including on American soil. After DeepSeek shocked the world early last year with its low-cost product, Chinese-developed open-source models, or models that allow developers to tweak the underlying codes for more tailored uses, accounted for almost a third of global model usage in some weeks of 2025—rising from a negligible base in late 2024, according to OpenRouter, a platform that helps developers access different AI models. In March, usage of Chinese models surpassed that of the U.S., OpenRouter data shows.
San Francisco-based AI coding tool developer Cursor, whose cofounder, 26-year-old Pakistani Sualeh Asif, is the youngest AI billionaire in the Asia-Pacific region, acknowledged in a March social media post that their latest product is built on Chinese company Moonshot’s Kimi K2.5 model. OpenClaw, the agentic AI service that has gone viral worldwide, draws upon Chinese models including those developed by MiniMax Group and Zhipu to perform tasks such as drafting emails and creating presentation slides. MiniMax’s 37-year-old founder Yan Junjie and Zhipu’s 50-year-old chairman Liu Debing are both new faces on the World’s billionaires list this year with a net worth of $7.2 billion and $9.1 billion respectively.
Here are five Asian billionaires who are making their own strides in AI.
Net worth: $53.8 billion
Tencent Chairman Ma Huateng plans to at least double the gaming and social media giant’s AI investments to $5.2 billion this year. He is ramping up model training, talent hiring and marketing promotion, and confirmed in March that Tencent, inspired by OpenClaw, is developing an AI agent tailored for WeChat—which can connect with the messaging service’s embedded mini-programs to perform tasks such as shopping and booking tickets for its over 1.4 billion users.
Net worth: $14.2 billion
Rising demand for Quanta Computer’s AI servers has propelled its stock 40% higher over the past 12 months. Quanta supplies its servers to clients including Meta and Alphabet amid the U.S. hyperscalers’ global data center expansion. To boost production and lease new equipment, Quanta announced in April that it would be investing $154 million in its factory in Fremont, California. Quanta cofounder C.C. Leung is also a billionaire with a net worth of $3.3 billion.
Net worth: $7.2 billion (NEW)
Shares of Chinese AI model developer MiniMax Group jumped almost fivefold since the OpenAI challenger’s Hong Kong IPO in January amid rising adoption of AI agents. Compared with chatbots that churn text-based outputs, agents must tap AI models more frequently to perform complex tasks such as drafting business proposals—meaning companies like MiniMax can charge developers and users more.MiniMax also “stands out with multi-modal models with faster iterations”,Jefferies analyst Thomas Chong wrote in a March research note.
Net worth: $5.1 billion
The AI boom is breathing new life into King Slide Works, which was set up by its chairman Lin Tsung-Chi in 1986 as a maker of furniture drawer slide rails. Nowadays these utilitarian products are used in data centers around the world to mount equipment in server cabinets.
Lin started out as a carpenter before founding King Slide, and has handed management roles to his family. His daughter Lin Shu-Chen and her husband Wang Chun Chiang are the company's president and executive vice president, respectively. Last year, the firm opened a new factory in Houston to supply the U.S. market.
Net worth: $1.8 billion
The chairman of South Korea’s ISU Group joined the world’s billionaire ranks late last year thanks to surging demand for AI-related components made by its associate company ISU Petasys. The unit specializes in an advanced type of printed circuit board designed to handle high intensity data transmission for AI chips, a necessity in data centers. It has four factories in South Korea and one in China.
ISU Group was started by Kim’s late father, Joon-sung, who founded South Korea’s first regional bank, Daegu Bank, in 1967. It listed on the Korea stock exchange in 2000.