AI Wunderkind DeepSeek’s Founder Debuts On China’s 100 Richest List

This story is part of Forbes’ coverage of China’s Richest 2025. See the full list here.

Chinese AI firm DeepSeek rattled the world in January when it released its low-cost AI model, R1, that was developed at a fraction of the cost of incumbent rivals such as OpenAI’s GPT. As tech stocks went into a free fall, the dark horse company’s founder, 40-year-old Liang Wenfeng, was catapulted into the billionaires club. He now joins the ranks of China’s 100 richest for the first time with an $11.5 billion fortune, based largely on his stake in the privately held firm, which Forbes values at an estimated $15 billion.

So far, DeepSeek hasn’t tapped external investors and has been funded mostly by Liang’s other venture, quantitative hedge fund High-Flyer, which he set up a decade ago. Analysts and VC investors from China and the U.S. estimate that DeepSeek could be worth between 5% and 10% of the $300 billion valuation OpenAI achieved in a March funding round led by Japan’s SoftBank. Although the American AI giant is widely reported to have hit a valuation of $500 billion when employees sold shares in October to an investor consortium that included Thrive Capital and T. Rowe Price, the valuation based on its March funding round serves as a better benchmark for DeepSeek, says Alex Platt, Portland-based research analyst at financial services firm D.A. Davidson.

Unlike OpenAI, which launched its advanced GPT-5 model in August, DeepSeek has yet to launch a next-generation model and has so far only released incremental updates to its current models. Moreover, add analysts, commercialization has been slow, with the Chinese company’s estimated sales being only a fraction of OpenAI’s reported $12 billion in annualized sales last year, says Platt. (DeepSeek and High-Flyer didn’t respond to requests for comments.) OpenAI charges a monthly fee ranging from $20 to $200 for more advanced versions of ChatGPT, from its more than 700 million weekly users. It also makes money from developers that pay to access the underlying models that power the chatbot.

Amid fierce domestic competition, Chinese companies have mostly been offering their chatbots for free. DeepSeek’s app had over 73 million active users in September, according to Chinese research firm aicpb.com. While the company charges business developers for using its models, the fee is modest, starting from $0.03 per million tokens, which is a measurement of the amount of data processed. OpenAI’s latest GPT-5 offering costs almost five times more, at least $0.125 per million tokens.

The DeepSeek founder has yet to outline any financial targets for his bootstrapped venture but in a rare interview with local media firm 36Kr last year, the reclusive Liang said his primary motive is driving innovation. China has been a follower for too long, he was quoted as saying, and DeepSeek’s goal is pushing the boundaries of technology.

The son of a primary school teacher, Liang traces his interest in AI back to his college days as a student of computer vision at Zhejiang University. After graduating with a master’s degree in information and communication engineering in 2010, he set up High-Flyer, using proprietary AI algorithms to pick stocks. The company manages about $8 billion in assets, according to financial data provider Preqin.

A research paper by Liang and his team, which made the cover of academic journal Nature in September, provided details of DeepSeek’s training methods, including how the firm spent only $294,000 to train one of its AI models. That compares with $500 million reportedly spent by rival OpenAI in one six-month training run of GPT-5. But DeepSeek’s self-declared cost doesn’t include an estimated $1.6 billion outlay on hardware over the years, including acquiring Nvidia chips, according to a January report by SemiAnalysis, a Florida-based research firm. Now with U.S. restrictions on semiconductor exports, the company has bought chips from Chinese telecoms giant Huawei to support its models, according to SemiAnalysis analyst AJ Kourabi.

Meanwhile at home, DeepSeek has to now contend with strong rivals, notably Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, which is investing over $50 billion in AI over the next three years as it aims for breakthroughs in artificial super intelligence, says Charlie Chai, a Shanghai-based analyst at 86Research, who notes that developers are starting to lean toward Alibaba’s Qwen models. These are “just as good as DeepSeek’s models, if not better,” says D.A. Davidson’s Platt, adding that the world is waiting to see what’s next from DeepSeek.