America’s richest technology founders and executives added more than $550bn to their combined fortunes in 2025, as financial markets priced in a sustained boom in artificial intelligence spending.
The ten wealthiest US tech leaders ended the year with close to $2.5 trillion in cash, listed shares and other investments tied to the AI build-out. That was up from about $1.9 trillion at the start of the year, an increase of roughly 18 per cent.
The gains reflect the market value of companies that sit at the centre of the AI supply chain: chipmakers, cloud and data-centre operators, and the largest consumer internet platforms now embedding AI into search, advertising and productivity software. The same trend has helped push heavyweight technology indices higher, even as investors debate whether the pace of capital spending can be matched by profits.
Elon Musk remained the world’s wealthiest individual, with the Financial Times reporting his fortune rose about 50 per cent in 2025 to roughly $645bn. The newspaper linked the increase to a revaluation of his holdings and AI-related positioning, including his AI venture xAI, alongside developments around Tesla and SpaceX.
Nvidia’s co-founder and chief executive, Jensen Huang, was another major beneficiary. Nvidia has been the key supplier of high-end graphics processors used to train and run large AI models, and its market value has risen alongside data-centre demand. The Financial Times put Huang’s net worth at about $156bn at year-end, underlining how closely personal wealth in the sector tracks a small number of listed firms.
Alphabet’s co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, also recorded sizeable increases. The Financial Times reported Page added about $270bn and Brin about $255bn over the year, as investors continued to back Google’s ability to defend its advertising business while competing aggressively in AI.
Larry Ellison, Oracle’s founder and chairman, was cited among the biggest gainers earlier in the year as Oracle marketed itself as an infrastructure provider for AI workloads. The Financial Times noted that Oracle benefited from the surge in demand for data-centre capacity, while also pointing to recent volatility as investors reassessed the durability of some AI-related valuations.
Not all of the year’s biggest names were clear winners. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg slipped in the rankings, according to the Financial Times, as the company’s heavy spending on AI infrastructure and products weighed on sentiment at points during the year. Meta has said it expects to invest substantially in compute and data centres to support AI systems across its apps and advertising tools, a strategy that has become a focal point for investors assessing near-term returns.
Bill Gates was the exception in the Financial Times list: his net worth declined in 2025 as he continued selling Microsoft shares to fund philanthropic commitments. While other founders saw wealth rise with the market, Gates’ approach reflected a long-running shift away from concentrated holdings in the company he built.
Behind the headline wealth gains sits an increasingly complex financing picture. The Financial Times reported this week that major tech groups and AI-linked firms have shifted more than $120bn of data-centre debt off their balance sheets through special purpose vehicles. Such structures can allow companies to raise large sums for building data centres while keeping liabilities outside traditional reporting lines, a feature that investors and regulators have examined closely in past credit cycles.
The report said Meta, xAI, Oracle and data-centre operator CoreWeave were among the companies using SPVs, with funding provided by large asset managers and private credit firms. The attraction, the Financial Times wrote, is access to deep pools of capital without the immediate impact on leverage ratios or credit ratings that might follow conventional borrowing. Critics argue that the approach can make risk harder to track if AI demand slows and cashflows fail to meet projections.
That concern has been echoed by parts of the investment industry. Bridgewater Associates has warned that Big Tech’s growing reliance on external capital to finance AI infrastructure is “dangerous”, pointing to the scale of funding needed as companies race to secure chips, power and data-centre capacity.
For markets, the question moving into 2026 is whether the AI build-out begins to generate predictable revenues that justify current valuations, or whether returns arrive more slowly than investors expect. For now, the year-end numbers show that the trade has remained profitable for a small circle of founders and executives whose wealth is tied to the companies selling the picks and shovels of the AI era.
