When OpenAI launched ChatGPT on November 30, 2022, it was positioned as a research preview. Within two months it had 100 million users — the fastest product adoption in history. Within 18 months it had triggered a wealth creation event that rivals the dot-com boom, the smartphone era, and possibly both combined. Here is exactly what has happened to the people at the centre of it.
Jensen Huang — the biggest wealth creation story of the AI era
No individual has benefited more from the AI boom than Jensen Huang, the co-founder and CEO of NVIDIA. In January 2020, NVIDIA was worth approximately $145 billion. By April 2026 it had reached $3.3 trillion — a 22x increase driven almost entirely by demand for GPU chips to train and run AI models.
Huang owns approximately 3.5% of NVIDIA. That stake is now worth over $115 billion, giving him an estimated personal net worth exceeding $120 billion. He co-founded NVIDIA in 1993 with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem with essentially nothing. The company spent its first decade building graphics chips for gaming. The decision to develop CUDA — a platform allowing developers to use GPUs for general-purpose computing — proved to be one of the most consequential product decisions in technology history, though nobody knew it at the time.
NVIDIA's FY2025 revenue reached $130 billion — growing 114% year on year — with data centre revenue alone reaching $115 billion. The company now earns more in a single quarter than it earned in its entire first decade combined.
The application layer — who is getting rich building on top of AI
The infrastructure layer (NVIDIA, cloud providers) has captured most of the AI-era wealth so far. The application layer is catching up. Cursor went from zero to $500 million in annual recurring revenue in under 18 months — the fastest growth rate of any developer tool in history. Midjourney built to $300 million ARR with 40 employees and zero venture capital. Lovable may have reached $100 million ARR in approximately 10 weeks.
The common thread across these application-layer companies is leverage. A 40-person company generating $300 million in revenue (Midjourney) has a revenue-per-employee ratio of $7.5 million — extraordinary by any measure in software history. This is the defining economic characteristic of the AI era: very small teams can build very large businesses very quickly.
What comes next — the second wave
The first wave of AI wealth was infrastructure (NVIDIA) and general-purpose models (OpenAI, Anthropic). The second wave will be vertical AI — products built for specific professions with domain-specific training. Medical AI, legal AI, financial AI, engineering AI. These products will charge 5-10x the price of general-purpose tools because they solve specific high-value problems. The companies building them are being founded right now.