Zhang Yiming Tops China's Rich List as AI Wealth Reshapes the Rankings
Every autumn, the Hurun China Rich List offers a snapshot of where money is being made — and this year the picture is dominated by two things: short video and artificial intelligence.
On October 27, the Hurun Research Institute released its 2026 ranking of China’s wealthiest people. A record 1,529 entrepreneurs with personal fortunes above 5 billion yuan (roughly $700 million) made the cut, 95 more than a year earlier. Their combined wealth reached 32 trillion yuan, up 7 percent, or 2.1 trillion yuan, from the previous year.
At the top for the second time is Zhang Yiming, the 43-year-old founder of ByteDance, the company behind the short-video apps Douyin in China and TikTok abroad. His personal wealth rose 43 percent in a year to 670 billion yuan, the highest figure ever recorded for a Chinese rich-list leader. The jump reflects ByteDance’s continued growth in advertising, e-commerce and, increasingly, AI services, even as its flagship apps face tougher competition at home.
The more striking new entry near the top is Liang Wenfeng, the 41-year-old founder of DeepSeek, the artificial intelligence company whose open-weight models drew global attention in early 2025. Liang’s fortune is put at 280 billion yuan, a remarkable rise for a founder whose company was little known outside technical circles two years ago. His position on the list is a direct signal of how quickly AI has become a source of enormous private wealth in China.
That shift matters beyond the wealthy themselves. The list is watched by investors, job seekers and entrepreneurs as a rough map of which industries are expanding and which are stalling. This year, the gainers cluster around AI models, chips, electric vehicles and the consumer internet. Traditional sectors such as real estate and coal, which once supplied many of the names at the top, are less prominent.
The record total also says something about the scale of China’s private economy. Even with slower overall growth and a cautious stock market, the number of people crossing the 5 billion yuan threshold continues to rise. Much of that wealth is paper wealth tied to private company valuations rather than cash, and it can swing sharply with funding rounds or market sentiment.
For global readers, the takeaway is that China’s tech fortunes are being remade around AI much as they were around e-commerce and mobile internet a decade ago. Zhang’s ByteDance and Liang’s DeepSeek represent two generations of that shift: one built on attention and scale, the other on models and computing power.
The next test will be whether these valuations hold. DeepSeek’s rise, in particular, depends on turning research prestige into durable revenue, while ByteDance must defend its core apps against rivals investing heavily in their own AI features. The 2027 list will show which of these bets paid off.