While the world debates whether AI will take our jobs or save humanity, a small class of insiders already has the answer: for them, it’s a gold rush. The AI boom is creating a new caste of “nouveaux riches” at a speed the tech world has never seen before, turning top engineers into figures chased with the same fervor as star athletes.

While the public grapples with the future, these are the people getting extraordinarily rich right now.

The New Kings of AI

At the top of the list is Jensen Huang, the leather-jacket-clad CEO of Nvidia. His company’s powerful chips are the essential hardware for training AI systems, and virtually every corporation and government with AI ambitions needs them. His personal fortune is now estimated at $159 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, making him the eighth richest person in the world. This year alone, his wealth has grown by over $44 billion, a direct result of his company’s stock becoming the most valuable on the planet, with a market cap exceeding $4 trillion.

Behind Huang is a new generation of founders and early engineers from the startups defining the AI era, including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Perplexity. Their fortunes come from the astronomical valuations of their private companies. OpenAI, for example, is now valued at around $500 billion, while Anthropic is reportedly seeking a $170 billion valuation. While their exact stakes are private, the founders of these firms, such as Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and key figures from OpenAI like Mira Murati and Ilya Sutskever, are now almost certainly billionaires. Murati and Sutskever left OpenAI to start their own companies: Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab and Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence Inc.

The trend is accelerating. So far this year, 53 companies have become “unicorns”—private startups valued at over $1 billion—and AI companies account for more than half of them, according to data from CB Insights.

“These AI-native unicorns are also breaking the mold, reaching $1B+ valuations on faster timelines, hitting the milestone in 6 years versus the typical 7,” the data firm said.

The Billionaire Boom and the Housing Squeeze

The problem with this new gold rush is that it’s concentrated in cities where the cost of living is already astronomical. As these new fortunes are minted in places like Silicon Valley and New York, the economic pressure on everyone else intensifies, further widening the gap between the haves and the have-nots.

The most immediate impact is on housing. According to Zillow, the average rent in San Francisco is now $3,526 a month, up $176 in the past year. In New York, it’s $3,800. These rising costs, fueled by the immense wealth of the tech elite, often drive out modest-income families, hollowing out the very communities where these companies are based.

While the AI boom may feel like a distant, abstract revolution, its consequences are already being felt on the ground, in the rent checks and housing prices paid by everyone else.