AI is already creating a billionaire boom: There are now 498 AI unicorns—and they’re worth $2.7 trillion

Success·Artificial IntelligenceAI is already creating a billionaire boom: There are now 498 AI unicorns—and they’re worth $2.7 trillionBy Jessica CoacciBy Jessica CoacciSuccess FellowJessica CoacciSuccess FellowJessica Coacci is a reporting fellow at Fortune where she covers success

Prior to joining Fortune, she worked as a ducer at CNN and CNBC.SEE FULL BIO AI is attracting wealth faster than a ChatGPT , bringing in record pace billion-dollar valuations, Dario Amodei's Anthropic

Chesnot—Getty ImagesAI is minting billion-dollar startups faster than the dot-com era, with 100 unicorns born in the last two years, including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Scale AI

No longer do leaders need to spend decades building the next big thing to join the ranks of Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos at the top of the billionaires ; they just need to build an AI company

A complete 100 of them were founded since 2023

There are more than 1,300 AI startups with valuations of over $100 million

Her startup, Thinking Machines Lab, has just closed a $2 billion seed round at a $12 billion valuation

We’ve not seen a boom this since the late 90s and early 2000s, which pelled many of the giants of today, from eBay to Google, into the main

While the dot-com boom can’t be directly compared because the “unicorn” label didn’t exist then and billion-dollar private valuations weren’t tracked, AI is creating billionaires at a record pace—and could even ring in an era of trillionaires

The AI billionaire boom With a boom in company valuation also comes hefty paydays for its founders, investors, and C-suite

According to data from Crunchbase, global venture funding in 2024 edged above 2023’s totals, with AI showing the biggest leap in amounts year-to-year

For the founders of Anthropic, including CEO Dario Amodei, reports indicate the Claude chatbot maker is in talks to raise $5 billion at a valuation of $170 billion

Amodei’s net worth is now over the billion-dollar mark

Also joining the billionaire is Liang Wenfeng

The founder and CEO of Chinese AI company DeepSeek is ly worth over $1 billion based on the estimated value of the low-cost AI company

And as investments into AI continue to boom, so do the net worths of billionaires working in them

Nvidia’s CFO Colette Kress and EVP Jay Puri have become billionaires, joining its CEO Jensen Huang after its market cap surpassed $4 trillion

Similarly, Palantir’s first billion-dollar quarter is dramatically increasing the wealth of the company’s cofounders and C-suite

Peter Thiel and Alex Karp have each seen their net worth jump by $17 billion collectively.Introducing the 2025 Fortune Global 500, the definitive ranking of the biggest companies in the world