The three tech founders leading China’s challenge to Silicon Valley in AI

The country's AI industry has gained momentum in recent months after Moonshot AI released Kimi K3, the world's largest open-weight AI model, while Z.ai introduced GLM-5.2, another leading open-source system. Together with DeepSeek, the companies have strengthened China's position as one of the U.S.' biggest competitors in artificial intelligence.

Here are the three founders driving that rise.

Liang Wenfeng, DeepSeek

LiangWenfeng, founder of startup DeepSeek, delivers keynote speech during the 10th China Private Equity Golden Bull Awards on August 30, 2019 in Shanghai, China. Photo by Reuters

Liang has become the face of China's AI boom after DeepSeek's open-source models won global attention for delivering performance comparable to leading Western systems at a fraction of the development cost.

Born in Zhanjiang, Guangdong province, Liang founded quantitative hedge fund High-Flyer with two university classmates before spinning off DeepSeek from its AI division in 2023. High-Flyer's profits from quantitative trading enabled the company to accumulate thousands of advanced graphics processing units, giving DeepSeek the computing power to develop cutting-edge AI models without relying on traditional venture capital.

DeepSeek burst onto the global stage in January 2025 with the release of its R1 reasoning model, which the company said matched OpenAI's ChatGPT on several benchmarks while requiring significantly lower training costs. Its open-source approach has since attracted developers and researchers worldwide.

Liang's rise has transformed him into one of China's most influential technology entrepreneurs. Time magazine included him on its 2025 list of the world's 100 most influential people, describing his emergence as a moment when "U.S. tech dominance was being openly questioned."

The 41-year-old is now the world's richest AI founder, with an estimated net worth of $36 billion after DeepSeek's June fundraising valued the company at $50 billion. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, he ranks ahead of OpenAI President Greg Brockman and Anthropic co-founder Dario Amodei, while also becoming China's eighth-richest person.

Despite DeepSeek's global profile, Liang has remained largely out of the public eye.

In a rare 2024 interview with Chinese publication Anyong, cited by Channel News Asia, Liang said China should evolve from adopting overseas technology to becoming a creator of breakthrough innovations.

He said DeepSeek's mission is to push the technological frontier while building an ecosystem that enables broader innovation rather than simply commercializing existing technologies.

Tang Jie, Z.ai

Z.ai founder Tang Jie. Photo from Tsinghua University website

Tsinghua University professor Tang Jie has spent nearly two decades helping shape China's AI talent while building one of the country's leading AI companies.

Tang co-founded Zhipu AI, now known as Z.ai, in 2019 with fellow faculty members and alumni from Tsinghua University. The company has since become one of China's leading AI developers, with its latest GLM-5 model competing directly with Anthropic's Claude Opus series in coding and AI agent benchmarks.

Shanghai-based research firm 86Research said investors increasingly view Z.ai as one of China's leading AI companies alongside Moonshot AI and Alibaba.

Investor enthusiasm has fueled the company's rapid rise. Z.ai recently announced a $4 billion share sale in Hong Kong and plans to pursue a Shanghai listing. The rally has helped Tang join the ranks of billionaires, with Forbes estimating his fortune at about $5 billion based on his stake in the company.

Born in 1977, Tang joined Tsinghua University's Department of Computer Science in 2006. He has published more than 100 research papers and created AMiner, an academic search platform that maps relationships among researchers, conferences and scientific publications. Tang also led development of Wu Dao, China's first superscale natural language AI model, unveiled in 2021.

On his academic website, Tang says he is devoting "all my efforts" to advancing artificial general intelligence.

Earlier this month, Tang told employees in an internal memo reviewed by Bloomberg that frontier AI should remain broadly accessible rather than controlled by a small number of companies.

"We choose a different path," Tang wrote. "One hand reaches higher, challenging the limits of intelligence, while the other lays the road ahead, making frontier capabilities as open and widely accessible as possible."

He also said Z.ai would prioritize breakthroughs in long-horizon reasoning, autonomous AI agents and self-training AI systems over short-term commercialization during the next two years.

Yang Zhilin, Moonshot AI

Founder of Moonshot AI, Yang Zhilin, delivers a speech at a conference of 2026 Zhongguancun forum, in Beijing, China March 25, 2026. Photo by Reuters

Yang has emerged as the newest star of China's AI industry after Moonshot AI launched Kimi K3, the world's largest open-weight AI model, in July.

The model's coding and AI agent capabilities rival leading systems from OpenAI and Anthropic while operating at significantly lower cost, marking another milestone for China's rapidly advancing AI sector, according to Business Insider.

AI experts said Kimi K3 became the first open model to outperform proprietary rivals on a comprehensive web engineering benchmark and is among the closest open-source models to the AI frontier.

The launch quickly thrust both Moonshot AI and Yang onto the global stage.

Yang earned his bachelor's degree at Tsinghua University, where he studied under Tang Jie before completing a Ph.D. in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University.

During his doctoral studies, he interned at Google Brain and Meta, co-authoring research with prominent AI scientists including Yann LeCun, Quoc V. Le and Yoshua Bengio. Although Apple reportedly sought to recruit him, Yang returned to China in 2023 to establish Moonshot AI.

The startup raised more than $2 billion in May from investors including Meituan, China Mobile and CPE. Its cumulative funding has exceeded $5.5 billion, while its valuation reached about $30 billion in June, according to Reuters

Yang has repeatedly said his ambitions extend far beyond launching another chatbot. In a 2024 interview with Chinese technology journalist Xiaojun Zhang, he said his goal is to "change the world over the next 10 to 20 years" by building a company capable of leading the next generation of AI.

Kimi K3's release also rattled financial markets, triggering a sell-off that erased hundreds of billions of dollars from major U.S. technology stocks, including Google and Nvidia. Analysts compared the market reaction to the disruption caused by DeepSeek's breakthrough earlier this year.

Demand for Kimi K3 quickly exceeded Moonshot AI's computing capacity, forcing the company to temporarily suspend new subscriptions two days after launch.

Despite the surge in demand, the company is still expected to pursue a Hong Kong listing later this year. The Telegraph reported that Moonshot AI is valued at around $30 billion, giving Yang a multibillion-dollar stake.