AI is continuing to create new billionaires, with 114 of the world’s 4,020 billionaires now linked to artificial intelligence companies, but this wealth creation also coincides with a parallel wealth destruction, according to a recent report.

As per the Hurun Global Rich List 2026, the number of AI billionaires currently stands at 114, with a little less than half — 46 — being new entrants to the list, suggesting a breakneck pace of wealth creation.

“Wealth was created faster last year than at any point in the Hurun Global Rich List’s history. We saw a record of over 700 new faces – that’s two a day for every day of the last year. The big winner of the last year was China, which added half the new entrants.” Rupert Hoogewerf, the chief researcher of the report, said.

The report also highlighted how AI became the “dominant wealth engine globally” last year, with key figures like Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and OpenAI founder Sam Altman seeing their wealth rise dramatically.

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AI-driven wealth boom

With Nvidia’s chips powering the AI boom in much of the world, Huang saw his wealth swell by 34% to $172 billion as the chipmaker broke through the $5 trillion mark, making him the 9th richest person on the list.

Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, meanwhile, surged into the third and fifth spots respectively as Alphabet shattered the $4 trillion market valuation mark, fuelled strongly by the global adoption of the Gemini 4 AI model and continued dominance of Google Cloud.

Oracle founder Larry Ellison’s wealth also surged by 32% to $267 billion, driven by his company’s aggressive expansion into AI and cloud computing.

Sam Altman of OpenAI, meanwhile, saw his wealth almost triple to $4.7 billion.

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Meanwhile, OpenAI rival Anthropic, the makers of Claude AI, alone created seven new billionaires, as its valuation soared to $380 billion—siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei, and Anthropic’s five other co-founders each touched $3.7 billion.

The year’s largest gainer in terms of percentage was Brett Adcock, founder of humanoid robotics company Figure AI, with the entrepreneur seeing his wealth rise over 10-fold to touch $16 billion as his firm reached a $39 billion valuation.

The youngest self-made billionaires on the Hurun Global Rich List 2026—Brendan Foody, Adarsh Hiremath, and Surya Midha, all aged 22, with valuations of $2.4 billion each—are also AI entrepreneurs, being founders of the AI recruitment startup Mercor.

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China, which had the most number of billionaires at 1,110 and created the most number of new entrants at 318, created just two new AI billionaires.

However, the existing Chinese billionaires on the list who saw their wealth increase the most were mostly AI-related, the Hurun report said.

Zhang Yiming of TikTok-owner ByteDance added $19 billion to his wealth to hit $79 billion, while Tencent CEO Ma Huateng saw his net worth rise to $66 billion.

GPU-maker Cambricon Technologies CEO Chen Tianshi, meanwhile, saw his wealth double to $25 billion while Wang Weixiu of data center provider Zhongji Innolight saw his wealth surge six-fold to $15 billion.

Baidu CEO Robin Li Yanhong saw his wealth surge to $12 billion while storage solutions provider Longsys’ CEO Cai Huabo’s net worth rose to $7.2 billion.

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‘Historic destruction of wealth’

The tremendous wealth created by AI and linked industries, however, also came at a cost.

“The AI revolution has a direct shadow side: a historic destruction of wealth among the legacy software and data companies it is disrupting,” said Hoogewerf.

To illustrate, the report pointed out that Michael Bloomberg saw his wealth fall 13% to $80 million, while Atlassian co-founders Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar saw their wealth decrease by half.

“Salesforce’s Marc Benioff and Workday’s David Duffield were both down a third, as AI replaces the addressable market for per-set SaaS tools,” the report said, adding that “India’s IT outsourcing founding families fell by a quarter collectively.”

“The message is stark: every dollar of new AI wealth broadly corresponds to a dollar of disruption in the legacy technology economy,” the Hurun Report chairman Hoogewerf said.