China’s economic slump isn’t stopping a billionaire boom in AI chips

• China's AI chip boom is minting billionaires at breakneck speed, even as the economy sputters.
• Surging investor interest in domestic AI and semiconductor stocks is driving rapid wealth gains.
• US chip bans are supercharging China's homegrown AI champions.

China's deepening property crisis has crushed household wealth and dented the fortunes of some of its biggest tycoons — but a new class of AI-era billionaires is rising fast.

This year, the standout winners are coming from China's red-hot AI chip sector.

On Wednesday, shares of MetaX Integrated Circuits Shanghai — a GPU startup founded by former AMD executives — skyrocketed as much as 755% on their first day of trading on the Shanghai Stock Exchange's tech-focused STAR Market, before closing up about 700%.

The surge catapulted its chairman and cofounder, Chen Weiliang, into one of China's fastest-rising tech moguls. Chen's stake in MetaX is worth about $6.5 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Other early insiders also saw eye-popping paper gains.

MetaX's other two cofounders and co-chief technology officers, Peng Li and Yang Jian, hold stakes worth hundreds of millions of dollars after the blockbuster debut, according to Bloomberg's calculations.

China's AI rush

Chen's rise follows that of another GPU entrepreneur, Zhang Jianzhong, the founder and CEO of Moore Threads Technology.

Earlier this month, Zhang's net worth jumped to $4.3 billion after his company's successful IPO, continuing a wave of investor enthusiasm for homegrown semiconductor players.

The richest figure in China's AI chip scene is Chen Tianshi, a cofounder and CEO of Cambricon Technologies — a company retail traders have dubbed "China's Nvidia."

Cambricon's Chen is now worth $22.5 billion, making him the country's 16th-richest individual on Bloomberg's list. He is the 115th richest person in the world.

These new fortunes reflect a sharp shift in investor sentiment.

Chinese AI and semiconductor stocks have been on a tear since the breakout of the China-made DeepSeek-R1 AI model released in January. The model helped spark a rally in local tech names and pushed the Hang Seng Tech Index up more than 20% so far this year.

Washington's tightening export controls on advanced Nvidia chips also contributed to the boom.

Such restrictions on high-end AI processors have choked China's access to cutting-edge US hardware and pushed Beijing to lean harder on domestic suppliers.

Still, China's new AI billionaires remain far from the top of the country's wealth rankings. The upper tier is still dominated by long-established tycoons.

In the top spot is Zhong Shanshan, the low-key bottled-water magnate behind Nongfu Spring, with a fortune of $68.1 billion, per Bloomberg.

Pony Ma, a cofounder and CEO of Tencent, ranks second with $66.5 billion — a fortune up 38% this year, on the heels of Tencent's AI-induced rally — while ByteDance cofounder Zhang Yiming comes in third with $65.2 billion.