DeepSeek Founder Is Now the Richest AI Model Developer — Bloomberg

Following another round of fundraising, the net worth of Liang Wenfen, founder of the Chinese AI developer DeepSeek, more than doubled to $36 billion. This makes him the wealthiest among the founders of AI development companies that have profited from artificial intelligence, according to Bloomberg.

Most of Liang’s wealth stems from his control over DeepSeek, the agency notes. In June, following another round of funding for the Chinese AI company worth $7.4 billion, its valuation increased roughly fivefold to $50 billion—up from $10 billion in April. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Lian owns up to 78% of DeepSeek. The agency therefore concludes that the founder of the Chinese AI developer’s net worth has risen to $36 billion (previously estimated at approximately $16.7 billion—an increase of more than 115%).

DeepSeek did not respond to requests for comment on this matter.

A new assessment of DeepSeek’s founder’s net worth indicates that, in terms of net worth, he has already surpassed Anthropic founder Dario Amodei ($8 billion) and OpenAI’s Greg Brockman ($25.5 billion), Bloomberg notes. For comparison, the agency considered only those companies whose core business and the majority of their revenue are directly related to the development of AI models (founders of diversified companies, such as Alibaba and Tencent, as well as other companies in the AI supply chain, such as data centers and chipmakers, were not included in this comparison). Thus, as of June 13, among the top 5 global AI billionaires who made their fortunes through AI development, in addition to Brockman and Amodei, Bloomberg also included the founder of Knowledge Atlas Technology (Zhipu) Liu Debin, with a net worth of $11.6 billion, and Minimax founder Yan Junjie, with a net worth of $2.2 billion. Another OpenAI co-founder, Sam Altman, is not mentioned in the ranking.

Lian's fortune, estimated at $36 billion, ranks him among the top 8 richest people in China, according to Bloomberg.

Liang founded DeepSeek in 2023 as a spin-off of the AI division of his hedge fund, Zhejiang High-Flyer Asset Management, — which he founded together with two former classmates with whom he began trading on the stock market back in his college days during the global financial crisis.

DeepSeek gained worldwide recognition over a year ago: in late 2024–early 2025, a Chinese developer released two AI models that performed on par with American market leaders in tests; moreover, according to their creators, — they were much cheaper and were developed faster than their Western counterparts. DeepSeek’s products then triggered a trillion-dollar sell-off on the U.S. stock market, calling into question the wisdom of Western corporations’ significant spending on AI infrastructure.

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor