The Billionaires Betting Big on Artificial Intelligence

Neuroscientists are fitting mice with tiny brain-computer interfaces in a two-story brick office building in Emeryville, California, the kind of unremarkable structure that might house a regional insurance broker or an accounting firm. As the mice navigate mazes, they are capturing neural patterns, creating a library of brain states that they intend to eventually convert into code. They think they can use the results to develop a new type of AI architecture that is based on how the human brain actually learns if it succeeds. It is being funded by Jed McCaleb, who made his fortune in the cryptocurrency space by founding Ripple and Stellar. He has now committed $1 billion of his wealth to the development of artificial general intelligence, or the ability of AI systems to perform on par with humans in almost every task. “Crypto was, in some sense, a big detour,” McCaleb remarked. “I’d been wanting to work on AI the whole time.”

Although McCaleb’s wager is unique in its details, its goal is completely unremarkable. According to Crunchbase, artificial intelligence companies raised $297 billion worldwide in the first three months of 2026, which is the highest amount of startup funding ever recorded in any industry, anywhere. During that time, 81% of all funding went toward AI. $122 billion was raised by OpenAI. A $30 billion funding round was completed by Anthropic. $20 billion was raised by Elon Musk’s xAI. The autonomous car startup Waymo made $16 billion. To put the scale in perspective, technology as a whole raised $425 billion in 2025—a record in and of itself. That yearly amount is expected to almost triple in the first quarter of 2026. The current investment in AI is not a passing fad. Global capital is being structurally reallocated.

The human side of this reallocation was captured in the Forbes 2026 billionaires list. With a combined net worth of about $2.9 trillion, there are currently 86 AI billionaires on the list. In the last year alone, 45 of them became billionaires. In addition to these gains, the list showed what Forbes called “historic wealth destruction” among data and legacy software companies, whose products AI is starting to replace or commodify. Compared to a straightforward technological boom, the current moment feels both more exciting and more unstable because creation and destruction are occurring at the same time. AI is making some people incredibly wealthy. Others are witnessing companies they built over decades lose their relevance more quickly than they anticipated.

Recent actions by Bill Ackman provide a helpful window into the strategies of some of Wall Street’s most well-known investors. Ackman disclosed that he had opened a roughly $2 billion position in Meta Platforms during his yearly investor presentation in February, describing it as “deeply discounted” for one of the “world’s greatest businesses.” With the addition, his AI-related holdings now account for over half of Pershing Square Capital Management’s total invested assets, which is an impressive concentration for a fund renowned for its methodical, value-focused approach.

Ackman’s reasoning was clear: Meta can invest heavily in AI infrastructure and talent without the financial strain that smaller competitors face thanks to its solid balance sheet and profitable core business. The business is already reaping the benefits, as evidenced by the fourth quarter’s revenue growth of 24%, which was fueled by AI-driven advancements in user engagement and ad targeting. In this reading, he is not alone. Investors who think Zuckerberg’s $60 to $65 billion AI investment commitment will compound over time have maintained institutional interest in Meta’s stock despite considerable pressure from investors dubious of its AI spending.

According to Quartz, a total of $650 billion in capital expenditures are planned by Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, and Google in 2026. This amount is beginning to have noticeable macroeconomic weight of its own. Data centers, cooling systems, specialized chips, fiber networks, and power generation capacity make up the vast physical infrastructure of artificial intelligence. In ways that economists are still attempting to fully model, the construction activity alone is generating demand across manufacturing, energy, real estate, and copper. When AI-related spending accounted for half of the U.S. GDP growth in 2025, the story transcended the technology sector. The billionaires aren’t merely placing wagers on a particular product category. They are placing a wager on a fundamental restructuring of the process that generates economic value.

The $122 billion raised by OpenAI and the $1 billion Jed McCaleb is spending in an Emeryville building watching mice navigate mazes may be examples of a real market cycle getting ahead of itself, which could result in returns that justify the capital but not on the timelines investors currently anticipate. Real economic change resulted from the internet boom of the 1990s, but it also caused a crash that destroyed vast amounts of speculative capital before the real value materialized. Whether AI takes a similar course is still up for debate. The fact that the individuals writing the biggest checks are not viewing this as speculative seems more difficult to refute. It’s being handled as settled. And the rest of the economy usually follows when billionaires act with such conviction.