AI is minting billionaires by the week. What’s interesting is not just the speed at which they’re making their money, but the sheer breadth of where the wealth is coming from.
This story features in Issue 21 of Forbes Australia. Tap here to secure your copy.
In 2025 alone, around 50 newly minted billionaires globally could trace their wealth directly to AI. The capital has flowed at a pace. Investors poured more than US$200 billion into the AI sector, with AI start-ups capturing roughly half of all global venture funding, according to Crunchbase.
So, exactly how are these billions being made?
First, there are the public faces behind the AI models themselves – like OpenAI and ChatGPT, Anthropic and Claude, DeepSeek, etc. Massive funding rounds fuelled the billionaire factory. For example, in early 2025, a US$3.5 billion funding round at a US$61.5 billion valuation propelled Anthropic’s seven co-founders into billionaire territory almost overnight.
But as with every great industrial shift, the fortunes are made by those supplying the tools and powering the system rather than headlining the story. The picks and shovels of the AI boom range from data labelling to energy and chips. Take data labelling company Scale AI. When Meta bought a 49% stake in the company for more than US$14 billion, co-founder Lucy Guo became the world’s youngest self-made woman billionaire with an estimated net worth of US$1.4 billion.
But perhaps the biggest pick and shovel of them all: datacentres.
AI’s voracious appetite for processing power has triggered a global datacentre arms race.
This year’s list of Australia’s 50 Richest clearly reflects that shift.
Two out of the three new entrants to this year’s list made their fortune in datacentres, bringing the number of tech-made billionaires to 10 – the highest since we launched.
At number 38 is Bangladesh-born Robin Khuda, with a personal net worth of US $2 billion. Khuda saw what was coming early, bet his house on it, and founded datacentre operator AirTrunk. The hyperscale datacentre operator (and the subject of our Forbes Australia cover story in October) was acquired by Blackstone in late 2024 at a whopping US$16 billion valuation.
Joining him are brothers Daniel and William Roberts, co-founders of Sydney-based data centre builder IREN, who enter the list at number 43 after the Nasdaq-listed company’s shares rose more than fivefold in the past year.
Khuda and the Roberts brothers are far from alone. Around the world, billionaires are riding the datacentre boom as countries across Asia scramble to expand capacity and catch up with the US, listed datacentre stocks surge, and tech giants pour billions into hyperscale campuses. And it even goes beyond Earth, with Elon Musk, Bezos, and others betting that AI’s future lies not on Earth but in space.
What’s clear is that Australia’s richest are changing. Ten of Australia’s 50 richest individuals have now made their fortunes in technology. Two are directly in AI. It’s a big shift from the days when mining, property and manufacturing dominated.
And as I’ve said before, this is why Forbes Australia 50 Richest list continues to fascinate me. It’s not just a celebration of wealth, but a snapshot of economic power – where capital is flowing and what the world values at a certain point in time. Four years in, and AI is already reshaping the list. I suspect it will look very different in another four.
Elsewhere in the issue, Stewart Hawkins took a cycle around the late Terry Snow’s 970-hectare Willinga Park estate and spoke to the family about his legacy, Canberra Airport and why now is the right time to sell the property.
And in Forbes Life, Sam Hussey dives into the booming business of Formula One, now firmly established as a serious asset class, just weeks out from its return to Melbourne.
Enjoy the issue, and hopefully, we’ll see you trackside.
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