"Four years ago, as Yan Junjie pitched his vision for artificial intelligence startup MiniMax Group Inc. to China’s largest internet companies and tech investors, the response was unanimous — and brutal.
“They genuinely believed we were frauds,” Yan recalls of the response to his idea: a company built entirely around multi-modal AI, meaning it’s capable of processing text, images, audio and video together.
Today, Shanghai-based MiniMax is a multibillion-dollar firm, making him a billionaire at 36. Its models — which he obsessively benchmarks against OpenAI — are helping fuel a new wave of technological nationalism. Along with peers such as DeepSeek’s millennial quant prodigy Liang Wenfeng and Unitree Robotics’ Wang Xingxing, Yan belongs to a generation of Chinese entrepreneurs challenging US dominance in AI.
And the group is growing in size as a flurry of Chinese AI firms go public, amongst them MetaX Integrated Circuits Shanghai Co.’s Chen Weiliang and Moore Threads Technology Co.’s Zhang Jianzhong.
These new tycoons have amassed a collective $100.5 billion, rivaling Bill Gates's $105 billion net worth. While significant, this remains well below the $153 billion fortune of Jensen Huang, one of the primary beneficiaries of the AI hardware boom in the US.
Their rise during an escalating tech and geopolitical rift between the world’s superpowers underscores how wealth creation in China is now entwined with the state’s push for technological independence.
That shift has ushered in a new kind of tech elite in China. The era of the rock-star CEOs — exemplified by Jack Ma’s extroverted performance at an Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s anniversary party in 2017 — has given way to a generation of quiet geeks."
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2026-china-ai-billionaires/
#AI #GenerativeAI #Billionaires #MiniMax #MetaX #China
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Miguel Afonso Caetano
Yonhap Infomax News
Metax
